Ancient of Days

PART TWO: His Heroic Heart

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

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

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

RuthClaire, on the other hand, had been wearing designer maternity clothes.

Encountering such items, I would mumble, “I’m glad they’re doing well. I’m glad they’re happy together.” Then I’d set the paper aside and busy myself revising a weekend menu.

As I say, business was booming.

In early December, I began to decorate the West Bank for Christmas. One day, with Livia George’s help, I was putting a sprig of mistletoe on an archway of wrapped plastic tubing facing the Greyhound Depot Laundry. A steady dristle—dristle is Livia George’s original portmanteau term for mist and drizzle—sifted down on us like a weatherman’s curse. Suddenly, out of this gloom, a silver hatchback pulled into a diagonal parking spot just below my stepladder.

“Hey,” Livia George said, “that’s the fella Miss RuthClaire brung in here las’ January. You know, the one done upchuck all ovah the table.”

“Adam!” I exclaimed.

“Now he’s got so uptown ’n’ pretty he drivin’ a silver bullet. An’ jes’ look who’s with him, too!”

“RuthClaire!” I cried. Even in the mist-cloaked street, the syllables of her name reverberated like bell notes.

We embraced all around. I even hugged Adam, who, in returning my hug, gave my back such a wrench that for a moment I thought a vertebra had snapped. He was gentler with Livia George, probably out of inbred habiline chivalry. When RuthClaire and I came together, though, we bumped bellies. She laughed self-consciously, and I knew that her baby wasn’t long for the womb. In defiance of the real possibility of her going into labor along the way, she and Adam had made the two-hour trip from Atlanta. That struck me as crazy. Angrily, I told them so.

“Relax, Paul. Even if I had, it wouldn’t have been a catastrophe.”

“On the expressway shoulder? Like a savage? You’ve got to be kidding!”

I turned to Adam. Although still far from a giant, he was taller than I remembered, maybe because he was wearing hand-tooled leather boots with elevator heels. I was going to rebuke him for making the drive with his wife so close to delivery, but RuthClaire had launched a spirited mini lecture: “Only a tiny fraction of all the babies born to our species have been born in hospitals, Paul. And that fact has not led to our extinction.”

I whirled on her. “What if you’d had trouble?”

She patted the opaque ball turret of her pregnancy. “Gunner here’s not going to cause any trouble. I’ll have him—or her—the way a birddog bitch drops her puppies. Thwup! Like that.”

“When is it due?” I asked, shaking my head.

“They don’t quite know. I’ve been pregnant since June at least. That puts me early in my seventh month.”

“She safe enough, then,” Livia George assured me.

Fresh-faced in the December mist, RuthClaire said, “That’s not altogether certain, Livia George. No one has any real idea what the habiline gestation period is. Or was. Adam says that as a kid on Montaraz he witnessed a couple of births, but he doesn’t have any memory of his people trying to reckon the length of a woman’s term.”

“Surely, one of those hotshots up at Emory has an opinion on the matter.”

“I’m sure they do, Paul, but we haven’t asked them. We think I’m close. Habilines may carry their offspring no more than five or six months, maybe even less. They’re small, you know.”

“Yeah. Even when they’re wearing platform heels.”

“That’s to help him reach the brake and accelerator pedals, not to pamper his vanity. Even so, we had those pedals lifted about four inches from the floorboard.”

“Jesus.” I gazed into the glowering pewter sky. “A thirty-six-year-old madonna on the brink of water-burst and an East African Richard Petty who can barely touch his brakes!”

“You gonna keep ’em out here all afternoon, Mistah Paul, or can they go inside to field your cuss-’em-outs.”

I waved everyone inside and sent Livia George to the kitchen for coffee and hot chocolate. It was still a couple of hours before my dinner crowd would descend.

“Why didn’t you telephone? I might not’ve even been here.”

“You’re always here, Paul. The West Bank’s what you do.”

“Yeah, but why didn’t you phone?”

“I always see Edna Twiggs sitting at the switchboard when I dial a Beulah Fork number, AT&T reorganization and all. I don’t trust the phones—not after last summer.”

“So you’d risk turning Adam into your obstetrician?”

“Absolutely. Adam and I have decided: I’m not having this baby in a hospital.”

Unable to help myself, I rolled my eyes.

“Stop it. You belittle everything you don’t understand.”

“You planning a hot-tub delivery? That’s one of the latest crazes. Mama pretends she’s a porpoise in Marineland.”

“Paul—”

“Birthing stools. That’s big, too. You have the kid squatting, like a football center pulling the pigskin out from under his jersey.”

Adam looked at his crooked hands on my new mint-green tablecloth. RuthClaire spoke through clenched teeth: “I’ll never understand how we got married. Never.”

Knowing I had gone too far, I apologized.

“Neither of those methods is as absurd as you make them out to be. Underwater delivery is nonstressful for mother and child, and a birthing stool gives a woman a degree of control over a process that’s rightfully her own, anyway. If your consciousness is ever raised, Paul Loyd, it’s going to have to be with a block and tackle.”

Livia George came back from the kitchen with our hot drinks. “Had six babies ’thout a doctor ’round,” she told us. “In a feather bed in my own house. Oldest done hit six-foot-four. Youngest ain’ been sick a day.”

Adam made a series of gestures with his hands, which RuthClaire translated: “Adam says to tell you that we want our baby born at Paradise Farm. We’ll even pay for the privilege. It’s important to us.”

“But why?” I asked, almost—but not quite—dumbstruck.

“As soon as I check into a hospital, the media will descend. It’s understandable, I guess, but I can’t let them turn the birth of our baby into an international circus. Paradise Farm’s already got a good security system, and it’s far enough from Atlanta to thwart a few of the inevitable busybodies.”

“RuthClaire, why not fly to some remote Caribbean island? You can afford it. It’s going to be butt-bruising cold here in Beulah Fork—not like in Zarakal or Haiti, kid.”

“Don’t you see? I’ll be comfortable out there. And what more fitting place to have Adam’s child than the place where we first met?” She turned an admiring—a loving—gaze on the habiline, and he responded with one of intelligent steadfastness.

Discomfited, I said, “You can stay out there, Ruthie Cee, on two conditions.”

“Two!”

I stood. “Just listen. They’re easy. First, you don’t pay me a dime.” Adam and RuthClaire exchanged a look, the meaning of which was obviously both gratitude and acceptance. “Second, let me find a discreet, reputable doctor to help with the delivery.”

“No! An outsider would needlessly complicate things, and I’m going to be fine.”

I told her there was still a possibility she might need help. How could I live with myself if anything went wrong? She replied that for the past six months Adam had been reading—yes, reading—every tome on childbirth he could find. It was also his opinion that the unborn infant’s gracile body—gracile, for God’s sake!—would ease its journey through the birth canal. Ruthie Cee, a birddog bitch dropping puppies.

My forefinger made a stabbing motion at Adam. “It’s hard for me to credit his coming so far in six months. Forgive me if I’m skeptical of his medical expertise.”

“He’s brighter than most, Paul, and he had a head start on Montaraz that nobody chooses to acknowledge.”

“But he’s not a doctor. And that’s my second condition.” RuthClaire stood. Adam stood. For a moment, I feared they’d leave, and I cursed my show of intractability. I was about to rescind my second condition when Livia George gave me a face-saving out:

“S’pose I midwife Miss RuthClaire’s little ’un? How that be?” She fluttered her hands before her. “I got lots of s’perience birthin’ babies.”

Hallelujah. RuthClaire, Adam, and I all did double takes. We all liked Livia George’s proposal. There was something about her turn of phrase, her cunning self-mockery. Our conflict thus resolved, we four took turns embracing as we had earlier done on the sidewalk.

I sent the Montarazes out to Paradise Farm with a set of keys. Livia George and I finished decorating and greeted the dinner crowd. Hazel Upchurch and Nancy Teavers came in at 4:30. By recent standards, business was slow and the evening dragged. At 11:30 I roared up the highway to see how my new lodgers were doing.

They had not yet gone to bed. I found them in RuthClaire’s old studio.

Often over the past few months, I had entered the untenanted loft to stand in its memory-haunted emptiness imagining just such a reunion. Now she was really back, my lost RuthClaire.

Adam, of course, was with her, sitting cross-legged on the drafting table opposite RuthClaire’s Naugahyde sofa, a book between his legs and gold-framed granny glasses clamped on the end of his broad, flat nose. The sleeves of his baby-blue velour shirt were rolled up, and he’d unzipped it to the midpoint of his sternum, revealing a flannel-y nest of reddish-black chest hair. He saw me before RuthClaire did.

“Still reading up on childbirth?” I asked him.

He bared his teeth—a smile, not a threat or an expression of fear—and lifted the book so I could see it. RuthClaire pulled herself to a sitting position with my nappy beige rearing-bear blanket around her shoulders. By the door, I leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Then I crossed to the drafting table to find out what Adam was reading. A small, slick paperback: The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis.

“C. S. Lewis?” I said incredulously, turning to RuthClaire. “A habiline holdover from the Pleistocene’s reading C. S. Lewis?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

I took the book from Adam. “Your husband—the living descendant of a bunch of East African mole people—is busily ingesting a work of theology?”

“Do you believe he can read?”

I glanced sidelong at Adam. I knew he’d mastered sign language, I had seen him driving a car, and his eyes were appraising me with a pause-prompting keenness.

“Sure,” I grudgingly admitted. “Why not?”

“Then why find it hard to believe he’s reading C. S. Lewis? The man wrote for children, you know. He even wrote science fiction.”

I changed tacks. “He ought to be reading, uh, Midwifery Made Easy, or Benjamin Spock, or something like that.”

“He’s done that already. Don’t you understand? His consciousness is emerging from a kind of mental Upper Paleolithic. Adam’s trying to find out who he is.”

“More birthing-stool psychobabble?”

“Only if you choose to belittle it as such.”

Adam made signs with both hands. I could not interpret them. The irony of his knowing a system of communication of which I was ignorant underscored the foolishness of my doubting his interest in theology. (If he could sign, he could just as easily genuflect.)

“He wants to know if he has a soul,” RuthClaire translated.

“So do I. Want to know if I have a soul, that is.”

“Your lack of a heart may imply something equally discouraging about your spiritual equipment, Paul.”

“It’s after midnight, kid. I can’t believe we’re discussing this.”

“What about it? Do you think Adam has a soul?”

“What kind of soul, for God’s sake? An animal soul? A rational soul? An immortal soul? All this sort of adolescent head game will get you is a migraine and a reputation as a philosophical nitpicker.”

RuthClaire flapped her nappy blanket. “Skip it. You’ve got all the sensitivity of a tire iron.” Dog-tired, I shuffled to the sofa and plopped down opposite her. She took pity and flapped an end of her blanket at me. I pulled it over my knees. “Almost like old times, hey, Paul?”

“I can’t recall having a chaperone before.”

“Livia George.”

“Livia George’s a chaperone the way Colonel Sanders is a spokesman for the Save-the-Chickens Fund.”

RuthClaire laughed, and we began to talk. Somehow, owing in part to Adam’s absorption in his book, it was almost as if we were alone in the wide, chilly room. RuthClaire told me that downstairs she had seen my growing collection of plates in her Footsteps on the Path to Man series. I had arranged the eight titles issued to date on hinged brass stands in a glass-fronted maple hutch. The plates included Ramapithecus, Australopithecus afarensis, A. africanus, A. boisei, Homo habilis, Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis. The habiline, first issued back in August, bore an undeniable resemblance to the gargoyle perched on my drafting table.

“Look,” I said, “you’ve still got ten unissued plates in this series. The eight main hominids on the road to Homo sapiens sapiens are already out. What’s next?”

“Contemporary racial variations.”

“Negroes, Caucasians, Orientals?”

“I’ve already done paintings for those and some others—Oceanics, aboriginals, American Indians. The final four are up in the air because there’s unavoidable overlap. I’ll probably do Eskimos, Arabs, pygmies, and Nordics, but I could substitute Bushmen or Montagnards or Ainu somewhere in there. It’s arbitrary, of course, a way to get the number of plates up to eighteen. AmeriCred’s hollering for the last four so they can put the plates into production. Me, I’m sick of the whole rotten thing.”

“Really? You don’t enjoy doing them?”

“It’s donkeywork. I liked doing the prehistoric numbers, Adam’s portrait and all that. But these last ten are sheer commercial excess. AmeriCred wants their subscribers to pay through the nose for gewgaws. I’m a hack writing otherwise worthless potboilers.”

“Enjoy your popularity. No one’s twisting their arms.”

“It’s not that I’m doing a lousy job, but these latest plates aren’t contributing anything to the development of my art. It’s safe representational stuff. My audience consists of well-to-do old ladies and fat-cat corporate executives looking for a ‘classy’ cultural investment.” She stuck out her tongue, as if to see if there was a piece of lint or tobacco on its tip. “That’s why I’ve been so slow to finish this assignment, Paul.”

“Blame it on your pregnancy.”

“I’ve done that. It’s a lie.”

“People who regret making money are nincompoops.”

“The regret—the guilt—comes from what you do to make it. Even you know that. Right now I’m whoring.”

Adam looked up from The Problem of Pain. He made some signs translatable as “Don’t talk rubbish,” then went back to Lewis’s little piece of theodicy.

“Whoring? You didn’t feel that way about The Celestial Hierarchy, did you?”

“No. Those are breakthrough paintings. I avoided all the clichés—archangels with flaming swords, naked cherubs with wings on their heels, Jesus dragging his old rugged hanging tree. I did something new. It was a small miracle the series was successful. A bigger miracle it ever got commissioned.”

“It made you popular. You hadn’t bargained for that.”

“‘How public,’” RuthClaire quoted, “‘like a frog.’”

“That’s smug elitism,” I said. “It’s probably insincere, too. You pretend to despise success because there’s an old art-school attitude that figures nothing popular can be worth a damn.”

“There’s a backlash against me in the Atlanta art community because of my success. The people who count up there see my work on these stupid plates as a sellout. I do, too. Now, especially.”

“If that opinion takes in the plates you’re proud of, to hell with them.”

“It’s more complicated than that. They don’t respect what I’m doing, and I can’t truly respect it, either—not my last ten examples of porcelain calendar art, anyway.”

“They’re jealous.”

“That enters into it. But I’ve always thought myself something of a visionary. My work for AmeriCred has undermined all that. The worst thing about the backlash is that I know I’ve brought it on myself.”

The studio’s fluorescents flickered palely as the wind gusted and moaned. The yew outside the twin-paned plate glass creaked its tall shadow across our imaginations. Even Adam looked up.

“Is that another reason you came down here? To escape the disapproval of the art-scene cognoscenti?”

RuthClaire frowned. “I don’t know.” Her spirits mysteriously revived. “They like what Adam does. In February, Paul, the folks at Abraxas will give an entire third-floor gallery room over to an exhibition of Adam’s paintings. It’ll be in place for two weeks. Promise me you’ll come see it.”

“The West Bank,” I reminded her. “It’s hard to get away.”

“You got away in February when you visited Brian Nollinger at that primate field station north of Atlanta. Well, Abraxas is twenty miles closer to Beulah Fork than that concentration camp for our furry cousins.” A grimace of unfeigned revulsion twisted her mouth, but then her eyes were facetiously pleading. “Listen, Mr. Loyd, I’ve just made you an offer you can’t refuse. Understand?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Yes, ma’am.”

And so Adam and RuthClaire stayed with me, and Livia George drove home with me from the West Bank every evening in case my ex-wife went into labor. At the restaurant itself, we had a prearranged telephone signal. Adam, out at Paradise Farm, would dial and let the phone ring once. Then he’d hang up, wait thirty seconds, and repeat the procedure. After the second ring, no matter how busy we were, Livia George and I would sprint up the Tocqueville Road in my Mercedes to answer his call.

Atlanta’s news media finally realized that the Montarazes had left the city. They phoned the West Bank looking for a lead. Sometimes they tried to induce Edna Twiggs to give them my unlisted number at Paradise Farm. She resisted. One day at lunch, in fact, she told me how she’d turned down a bribe of money for that information. Edna Twiggs, an ally! Even so, I took the added precaution of connecting all the telephones in my house to an answering machine so that, in my absence, RuthClaire and Adam could monitor incoming calls. Fortunately, no one but me ever tried to ring them up.

I was still concerned that someone in a TV van or a newspaper company car might try to gatecrash. The Atlanta papers had recently featured headlines about Adam and RuthClaire. In the morning Constitution, this:

In the afternoon paper, the Journal, this:

The story under this last headline reported an interview with David Blau, director of the Abraxas Gallery. Blau thought that the Montarazes were okay, but still believed they should contact him or one of his associates to confirm the fact.

“Is this guy one of the avant-garde bigwigs who think you’ve sold out?” I asked RuthClaire.

“David’s more charitable than most. He credits me with practicing a deliberate serious-commercial split.”

“Sounds like a decent enough Joe.”

“He is. That’s why I’ve got to give him a call.”

“Don’t,” I blurted. My newfound, but still tepid, regard for Edna Twiggs did not permit me to trust her totally. “Write a note. Put no return address on the envelope. I’ll mail it from Tocqueville tomorrow morning. He’ll have it the day after.”

That’s what we did. While I was in Tocqueville to mail the note, I hired a trio of private guards from a security agency in the Tocqueville Commons Mall. The first man came on duty that same afternoon.

Once the guards began their shifts, my taut nerves loosened. The likelihood of anyone’s circling the farm and coming at us by way of White Cow Creek seemed remote. It must have seemed remote to RuthClaire, too. She made up her mind to have her baby in a peaked canvas tent that she and Adam pitched beneath a pecan tree. The tent was lavender, reminiscent of the floppy conical hoods worn by Teavers, Puddicombe, and their anonymous Klan-mates on the night they came to kill Adam. I told RuthClaire so the morning after their tent first went up, its lavender surfaces sparkling with frost.

“You’re right,” she said, startled. “We bought it at a sporting-goods store in Atlanta and I never once thought of that. Maybe Adam did, though. Teavers’s robe may have kept him from coming down with pneumonia.”

“This tent won’t keep you warm. The temp today is in the twenties, RuthClaire.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“What about the baby?”

“The kid’s half habiline. Habilines are traditionally, and altogether naturally, born out of doors. The tent’s a compromise.”

“Out of doors in Africa or Haiti!”

“If it’s cold, Livia George can wrap the baby in a blanket and take it inside.”

“Then what’s the point of the stupid purple tent?”

“I’ve already told you. Don’t you listen?” She turned on her heel and stalked toward the plate-glass doors glittering above my patio deck. I followed her, shaking my head and mumbling.

Adam continued to read The Problem of Pain. Too, from the library in Tocqueville—a side trip I made on the same day I hired the security guards and mailed my ex’s note—he had me check out some other basic books on religious or spiritual topics: The Screwtape Letters by Lewis, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a young person’s guide to understanding the great world religions, an English translation of the Koran, a biography of Gandhi, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, something called The Alphabet of Grace by Frederick Buechner, The Way of the Sufi by Idries Shah, a primer on the Talmud, and Mortimer Adler’s How to Think About God. Heady stuff for a habiline. I had to carry the whole lot home in a Gilman No-Tare grocery bag from our local A&P.

Adam painted during the days, read in the evenings. Ruthie Cee, on the other hand, neither painted nor read. She usually slept while Adam worked. Sometimes she watched him. (He was putting the finishing touches on a huge, semiabstract landscape featuring a tangerine-red tree that reminded me of an African baobab.) She may have occasionally prepared a meal, but if she did, she wasn’t regular about it. She had no need to be. Livia George and I scrupulously brought them at least one hot gourmet meal a day.

Saturday night at the West Bank: six or seven people standing cheerful but also mildly impatient just inside the door, waiting to be seated. Fur jackets or chic leather car coats on the ladies. The men bundled in herringbone or expensive brushed sheepskin. Cold air swirling around the newcomers like the vapor in a frozen-food bin. The phone next to the cash register rang. I looked over at the flocked divider concealing the phone. A second ring was not forthcoming.

Oh no, I thought, not tonight!

I smiled at a woman with a magazine-cover death mask for a face and put one hand reassuringly on the shoulder of her escort. Mentally, though, I counted to thirty. The telephone rang again.

“That’s it!” I cried. “That’s it!”

Livia George scurried in from the kitchen wiping her hands on her apron. Her heavy upper arms were bare, but she made no move to find her coat. “Gotta get goin’, Mistah Paul.” She pushed through the astonished people at the door. “Gotta he’p Miss RuthClaire birth that beautiful baby.” She hustled out the door, down the sidewalk, and into the front seat of my Mercedes, driver’s side. Helplessly, I followed, already resigned to the role of passenger.

The trip took maybe nine minutes.

Our security guard automatically passed us through the gate, and my car’s steel-belted radials flung gravel back at him as Livia George fishtailed us up the drive to the house. I was taking two steps at a time toward the front door when Livvy, at the corner of the house, shouted,

“Not that way, Mistah Paul! She in that purple pup tent out back!”

“Go on!” I urged her. “I’ve got to grab a coat!”

The warmth of the house hit me like a Gulf Coast wind. I took a jacket from the shoulders of the baby-satyr statue on which I’d draped it several days ago, pulled it on, and strode into the living room looking for a shawl or sweater for Livia George. From the back of a chair, I grabbed a peach-toned afghan. But on the way to the sliding doors I hesitated. Did I really want to see the woman I loved in the throes of childbirth? Sure. Of course I did. Wasn’t that what every sensitive with-it male wanted nowadays? Men attended classes to learn how to provide support at the Moment of Truth. Some even scrubbed and put on surgical gowns to participate in the event. If their partners were back-to-nature advocates, they might build birthing stools or prepare for underwater delivery by buying scuba-diving gear. All I had to do was slide open a plate-glass door and trip across my deck to a tent in a pecan grove.

I was no longer RuthClaire’s husband. The child in her womb owed me no genetic debt. It instead owed this paternal debt to a mute, sinewy creature right out of the early Paleolithic. Was the arrival of this squalling relic really an event I wanted to witness? My concern should have been for RuthClaire’s safety, for the health and well-being of her child—but baser impulses had me in their grip and I hesitated.

Taking a breath, I went out onto my deck. The cold hit me like an Arctic hammer stroke, but I staggered through the pillars of my silhouetted pecan trees to RuthClaire’s lavender tent. Inside the translucent smudge of the sailcloth, shadowy shapes stooped, straightened, gesticulated. Adam, I was glad to see, had taken my PowerLite into the tent. He’d even thought to tote one of the studio’s sun lamps out there, an extension cord from the deck down into the pecan grove giving me a trail to follow.

A hundred yards or so beyond the tent, a quick flash of light. I halted, blinked, looked again—but now the corridor of sentinel pecans was empty of any intruder but the keening wind.

“Mistah Paul, you better move your fanny fas’ if you wanna see this!” I moved my fanny fast. After skidding in the frost-rimed mulch, I whipped aside the tent flap, edged inside, and found RuthClaire flat on her back on a mound of blankets and ancient bed sheets spread out on a plastic drop cloth. Adam knelt to one side of his wife, but Livvy squatted between her legs—legs bundled in a pair of those ugly knit calf-warmers worn by women in aerobic-dancing classes—guiding from her womb the mocha-cream-colored product of her pregnancy.

“I told you it’d be easy!” RuthClaire cried, letting her head fall back and laughing.

Livvy did something sure-handed to the umbilical cord, then lifted the minuscule infant by its ankles, bracing its back with one hand and showing it first to Adam and then me. It was a boy, but a wizened and fragile-looking one. When Livvy slapped him on his angular buttocks, he sucked in air and wailed. Surprisingly, the sound lasted only a few brief seconds. Evolution on the Serengeti grasslands, I later came to realize, had selected for habilines whose newborns shut up in a hurry.

“Ain’ he a dandy!”

I put the afghan around Livia George’s shoulders. Adam reached into the wings of the towel swaddling the baby to touch his son’s head. Something like a smile flickered around Adam’s lips.

“Okay,” I said. “Ruthie’s proved she’s game enough to bear her child in the back yard. Now let’s get inside.”

“Got a little bidness to take care of yet.” Livvy handed the baby to its father. She knelt and massaged the undersides of RuthClaire’s thighs. Then she began to push gently on her slack, exposed abdomen, to encourage the expulsion of the placenta. “Y’all go on in. Nothin’ else for you to do out here.”

But before Adam and I could exit, two strangers shoved their way into the tent.

First, a blond man in a double-breasted safari jacket confronted us. Behind him, balancing a portable video unit on his denim-clad shoulder, was a slender black man. These intruders were so businesslike about deploying their equipment and their persons in the cramped interior that I considered the possibility that Adam and RuthClaire had hired them to video-tape their baby’s delivery. If so, they were late.

“I’m Brad Barrington of Contact Cable News,” announced the blond intruder. “My cameraman, Rudy Starnes.” The black man gave a perfunctory nod. “Well, well, well. Is this little fellow the Montaraz baby?” He chucked the newborn under the chin with a gloved finger. “Looks like we underestimated the time it’d take us to get through the woods, Rudy. The big show’s already come off.”

“Sun lamp’s giving us plenty of light to shoot by, Brad. Maybe I can do some reenactment footage to save the situation.”

“Yeah,” said Barrington. “And on-the-scene interviews.”

Grimacing, RuthClaire raised up on her elbows. “What in pity’s name do you guys think you’re doing?”

“You’re trespassing,” I told them. “You sneaked onto Paradise Farm from Cleve Snyder’s property.”

A microphone in his fist, Barrington duck-walked beneath the tilted sun lamp to RuthClaire’s shoulder, where he asked if it had been a difficult delivery. Leaning into the mike, RuthClaire emitted a piercing scream. Barrington recoiled, almost doing a pratfall. Livia George, meanwhile, had slid the glistening placenta into a piece of torn sheet. Her manner implied that the appearance of the two-man Contact Cable News crew was none of her affair. If nothing else, it was preferable to a hurricane.

“Who’s doing security tonight?” I asked. (I always forgot the guards’ names.)

“Chalmers,” RuthClaire replied, spitting out the word.

Barrington, looking more annoyed than abashed, approached her again with the microphone. “Don’t you think this landmark event deserves a permanent video record? Don’t you feel any sense of obligation to history?”

RuthClaire, her breath ballooning, said, “Don’t you feel any sense of shame, hanging over a half-naked woman with that instrument of psychic rape in your fist?”

A thin veil of confusion fell across the newsman’s face.

“Get out of here,” I told him. “My first and last warning.”

“Let’s go, Brad,” the black man said. “This ain’t working out.” Almost certainly at his partner’s bidding, Starnes had just hauled a ton of equipment across five or six hundred yards of wintry darkness, and nothing was going as planned.

“Keep shooting,” the blond man told him.

“Brad—”

“This is a scoop! You see anyone down here from Channel Five or Eleven Alive? You know anybody else who staked out this place for three ass-freezing days?”

“Nobody else that dumb.”

I slipped outside and called for Chalmers, the guard. That did it for Starnes. He decamped, abandoning his associate to whatever fate he chose to fashion for himself. He was hiking speedily off through the pecan grove, his equipment banging, when Chalmers came trotting around the corner of the house with his pistol drawn. The guard started to pursue the cameraman.

“Let him go,” I said. “It’s the talking head in the tent who needs his butt run in.”

Matters unraveled confusedly after that. RuthClaire was yelling at Barrington to go away, go away, and Livia George came out into the cold with the infant, nodding once at the house to show us that she was taking him indoors. Chalmers, a tall young man in an official-looking parka, started to go into the tent after Barrington when Barrington fell backward through the tent flap with Adam’s head in his stomach and his arms pinioned to his sides. In a rapid-fire falsetto utterly unlike his on-the-air baritone, he was pleading for mercy—but he landed on his back with a loud expulsion of breath and immediately fell silent. Adam was all over him like a pit bull, leaping from flank to flank over the reporter’s prostrate form, baring his teeth and growling as if rabid. RuthClaire emerged from the tent, too. Her blood-stained dressing gown hung to her ankles, her incongruous maroon leg-warmers visible just beneath its hem. She grasped one of the tent’s guy ropes for support.

In a tone of rational admonishment, she said, “Adam, I’m okay. That’s enough.”

Through the fog of his rage, Adam still heard her. He stopped, Barrington’s body rigid beneath him, and looked up sightlessly at Chalmers and me. Slowly—almost shockingly—sanity returned to his eyes, and he pushed himself off the reporter with his knuckles and stepped away from his whimpering victim.

“I want to hold my baby,” RuthClaire told him. “Take me in.”

Still trying to compose himself, Adam escorted her to the house. Chalmers and I remained outside with Barrington, the guard pointing his pistol at the newsman’s head. What now? Were we within our rights to shoot the trespasser?

Barrington stopped whimpering. Seeing me upside-down, he asked if he could have a cup of coffee before he called his station for a ride back to Atlanta. “That damned Starnes. He’s probably to Newnan by now.”

Chalmers said, “If Mr. Loyd presses charges, you won’t be going back to Atlanta tonight. I’ll turn you over to the sheriff in Tocqueville for a little quiet cell time.”

Barrington got off the ground, groaning elaborately, and we argued the matter. If he gave his word that Contact Cable News would never air the least snippet of tape taken tonight on Paradise Farm, I told him, I would forgo the pleasure of pressing charges. I’d be damned, though, if I’d serve him a cup of coffee or let him use the bathroom. Barrington grumped about the First Amendment and Freedom of the Press, but verbally accepted my terms.

Then Chalmers and I escorted him to the front gate. There, with a display of loyalty totally undeserved, Rudy Starnes picked up Barrington in the Contact Cable News van in which the two had been camping for the past three ass-freezing days, presumably to drive him back up the lonely highway to Atlanta.

Upstairs, in a tiny bedroom next to the studio, I found Livia George with the new parents. In one corner was a white wicker bassinet, but RuthClaire was sitting in an upholstered chair nursing her baby, whom someone had bagged up in a yellow terrycloth sleeper. A newt, I thought. A salamander. I reported what had happened with Barrington and told Livvy that I needed to get back to the West Bank to oversee the restaurant’s closing—assuming, that is, that my hires had not long since walked off the job in bootless anger and frustration.

“They’ll be back,” RuthClaire said.

“I hope so,” I said. “It’s hard finding good help.”

“Oh, I don’t mean help. I’m talking about those jerks from Contact Cable.”

Adam stalked out of the room. Lights clicked on in the studio, and a wash of yellow lambency unrolled past the nursery.

“I don’t think he remembers the last time he let himself go like that,” RuthClaire said by way of explanation.

“The time he wrestled E. L. Teavers into the brick kiln?”

“That was self-defense, Paul, a matter of life and death. Tonight, the only thing that was truly at stake was the sanctity of our baby’s birth.”

“Adam be awright tomorrow,” Livia George said. “It’s jes’ too much ’citement for one evening.”

“He didn’t even bite the bastard,” I said. “Just knocked him down and growled.”

“He went wild.”

“Everybody goes wild now and then.” I grinned. “Why, Ruthie Cee, even you went a little wild this evening.”

She shifted her hold on the baby. “We discussed naming this little character for you. Keep that up, though, and you can forget it.” Gently, she began to jog the suckling infant in her arms. “Adam sets standards for himself, high ones. They’re high because the general expectation is that he’ll comport himself like an animal. Well, his sense of self-respect demands that he never—ever—fulfill that cynical expectation.”

“Then his standards are higher than nine tenths of the world’s human population.”

“Adam’s human.”

“You know what I mean. I was trying to compliment him.”

The baby—Paul Montaraz, I realized with sudden humbling insight—had fallen asleep nursing. He was small. Even asleep, his mouth tugged at RuthClaire’s nipple with desperate infantile greed. Livia George lifted him, coaxed a burp from him, and lay him on a quilted coverlet in the bassinet. RuthClaire told me that tomorrow morning the Montaraz family would return to Atlanta and my own life could go back to normal.

“Whoever said I wanted a normal life?”

“Look in on Adam, will you, Paul? Right now, another person’s attentions might be better medicine for his blues than mine.”

I looked in on Adam. He was sitting on the drafting table, his stack of read and unread library books teetering at his knees. Although he heard me enter, he refused to look up. We were alone together in the tall drafty expanse of the studio. Despite the room’s chilliness, my hands began to sweat.

“Adam,” I said. “Don’t feel bad about going after that Contact Cable turkey. If it had been me, I’d’ve bit him.”

The habiline looked me in the eye. His upper lip drew back to reveal his pink gums and primitive, powerful teeth. I looked away. When I looked again, Adam’s gaze had gone back to his book.

“Let me congratulate you on becoming a father, Adam. The kid’s a crackerjack.” No response. “What’s that you’re reading?”

The cloak of civility he was trying to grow into would not let him ignore a direct question. He lifted the small volume so I could read its title. Ah, The Problem of Pain again, on which Adam had foundered shortly after his arrival. I turned the book around and saw that now he’d run aground on the beginning of Chapter 9, “Animal Pain.” One sentence jumped out at me as it may have already jumped out at Adam: “So far as we know beasts are incapable of either sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it.” My belief that this sentence may have wounded Adam was predicated on the feeling that although RuthClaire had accepted him as fully human, he had yet to accept himself as such.

“You ought to try Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet,” I said. “It’s a helluva lot more fun than his theology.”

Adam tweezered the book from my two-fingered grip, pulled it to his chest, and then flung it past my head to the far end of the studio. Like a broken-backed bird, it flapped to a leaning standstill against the baseboard. Adam took advantage of my surprise to hop down from the table. Exiting the studio, he put me in mind of a lame elf or an oddly graceful chimpanzee: there was something either crippled-seeming or animalish about his walk. “Shame on you, Loyd,” I scolded myself.

Papa, Mama, and Little Baby Montaraz went back to Atlanta. The international media descended upon their home not far from Little Five Points, a two-story structure with a ramshackle gallery, lots of spooky gables, and a wide Faulknerian veranda. The house became almost as famous as the kid.

As for little Paul, he rapidly turned into the anthropological prince of American celebrity. Everyone wanted a piece of him and his parents. People, Newsweek, Life, 60 Minutes, 20-20, Discovery, Nova, Cosmopolitan, Omni, Reader’s Digest, and a host of other publications and programs sought to report, analyze, or simply ride the giddy whirlwind of the Montaraz Phenomenon. Indeed, it took better than a year for the extravagant circus surrounding the family to dismantle its tents and mothball its clown costumes, but, for long afterward, a carnival of revolving sideshows kept the promise (or threat) of an even dizzier Return Engagement before the public.

But I’m running ahead of myself. Let me back up.

In the absence of an attending physician, Tiny Paul required a birth certificate. Because his parents had left Paradise Farm early on Sunday morning, there was no way for them to obtain a file form on which to apply for a certificate from the Hothlepoya County Health Department. On Monday, then, I drove to Tocqueville to pick up the form. I filled it out standing at the registrar’s counter. Surprisingly, she treated the application as a routine matter. When I questioned her, she told me that the form would now go to the Office of Vital Records in the state-government complex in Atlanta.

“What about the birth certificate?”

“Send in a three-dollar filing fee and they’ll send it. It really doesn’t take long.”

“If I write the check, should I specify that the certificate itself should go to the parents’ Atlanta address?”

The young woman—trim, deftly mascaraed—looked at me with a flicker of interest. “Why would they send the certificate to you? Writing the check doesn’t make you the child’s father.”

“Then it isn’t necessary?”

“Of course not.”

Irritated, I sought to shock her. “What if I did happen to be the kid’s father?”

“Then it’s awfully big of you to pay the filing fee,” she said smoothly.

I grunted, pocketed my checkbook, and left.

On Wednesday, I received a long white envelope from Atlanta, not from the Office of Vital Records but from RuthClaire and Adam. The notes inside were both in Ruthie Cee’s peculiar El Grecoish script—tall, nearsighted characters in anguished postures—but the second was reputedly dictation from Adam. Even in my ex’s etiolated script, Adam’s was the more original and perplexing document:

I reread this letter closely several times. What wouldn’t a reporter give to lay hands on it? I thought briefly of letting different outfits bid for it, but once I had rejected this course as vile beyond even my notorious reverence for the profit motive, I never looked back. Adam was no longer my rival, he was my friend.

I tried to imagine what sort of surgery the specialists at Emory were planning for Adam, but could adduce only such routine operations as appendectomy, tonsillectomy, molar extractions, and, forgive me, circumcision. Then it occurred to me that the doctors might be contemplating more exotic procedures, viz., rendering Adam’s thumbs wholly opposable, surgically removing his sagittal crest, or increasing his body height by putting artificial bone sections in his thighs or lower legs. The first and third options would perhaps make it easier for Adam to function among us, but the second was a potentially dangerous sop to his or RuthClaire’s (vicarious) vanity—for which reason I struck it from my catalogue.

What then? What were they going to do to Adam?

I folded the notes back into their envelopes, feeling good about having decided to consider Adam my friend. Now I must act on that decision and enforce it by framing a reply. I found a grungy 13-cent postcard and wrote on it the following message:

Christmas came and went. In Atlanta, the circus had begun. I wondered if my postcard had passed under prying eyes, thereby triggering the Montarazes’ ordeal with the press. In the future, sealed letters only.

Early in February, RuthClaire wrote to say they had received Tiny Paul’s birth certificate. She included three dollars to cover the cost of the registration fee. I sent the money back. But with the bills and the note was a printed invitation to Adam’s first exhibition of paintings at Abraxas. A wine-and-cheese reception in Adam’s honor would precede the show, and I was also invited to that. On the printed card RuthClaire had written, “You’d better be here, Philistine!”

The reception was on a Tuesday evening. I closed the West Bank after our midday meal, gave Livia George and the others both that evening and Wednesday off, put a sign on the door, and set off for the Big City… just in time to collide with rush hour.

Dristle kept my windshield wipers klik-klikking, and it was almost completely dark when I finally made my way up Moreland Avenue to Little Five Points and the Montaraz house on Hurt Street. That house, how to describe it? Its silhouette oozed a jolly decadence suggesting Mardi Gras, shrimp creole, tasseled strippers, and derby-hatted funeral processionaires. A pair of lamps on black cast-iron poles shone on either side of the cobbled walk, their globes like spheres of shimmering, honey-colored wax. By their light, I saw two indistinct figures come out on the front porch, down the steps, and hand in hand through the mistfall to my car. I let them in.

RuthClaire and Adam, of course, in polished boots and fleece-lined London Fog trench coats. From their bodies wafted the smells of soap, cologne, lipstick, aftershave, winter rain, and something peculiarly oniony.

“Don’t I get to come in?” I squinted at my invitation. “This is a wine-and-cheese reception, not a dinner.”

Adam sat next to me, but his lady had slid into the back seat. “David Blau,” she said, leaning forward, “asked us to come a tad early, Paul. We’re letting you drive to throw the press off. They’ll be looking for our hatchback.”

“I thought they always had your place surrounded.”

“Until we got Bilker Moody, they usually did. Tonight, though, the majority’s already at Abraxas.”

I asked about my godson. He was with the sitter, Pam Sorrells, an administrative assistant at the gallery who had sacrificed her own attendance at the opening to free Adam and RuthClaire for the event. An armed security guard—the aforementioned Bilker Moody—was also in the living room to protect La Casa Montaraz from uninvited guests. Bilker was nearly always present. That was the way their little family had to live nowadays.

“Look, the show’s not officially over until eleven, Ruthie Cee. My stomach will be rumbling like Vesuvius by then.”

Adam reached into the pocket of his trench coat and withdrew a McDonald’s cheeseburger in its Mazola Oil-colored wrapper. It was still warm—warm and enticingly oniony-smelling. I glanced sidelong at this object of gastronomical kitsch.

“Dare we offer a five-star restaurateur a treat from the Golden Arches?” RuthClaire asked.

“Ordinarily, only at your peril. Promise not to tell anyone, though, and tonight I’ll discreetly humble myself.”

I ate the cheeseburger. Adam produced a second one. I ate it, too. For dessert, RuthClaire handed me a (badly needed) breath mint. Then off we drove. A nondescript pickup truck materialized about midway along the block behind us and tailed us all the way to the gallery.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines abraxas as “a composite word composed of Greek letters formerly inscribed on charms, amulets, and gems in the belief that it possessed magical qualities.”

In Atlanta, the gallery called Abraxas is an influential but underfunded alternative-arts center in a predominantly black section of the city. The buildings making up the complex—a print shop, a theater, the galleries, and the studio wing—used to belong to a school. With the exception of the print shop and the studio wing, they were built early in the century in a stolid red-brick architectural style giving them the grim look of a prison or an oversized Andrew Carnegie library. Coming toward Abraxas from the east, you swing back and forth along Ralph McGill Boulevard between modest clapboard and brick houses until you attain the crest of a hill that plunges precipitously toward the foot of yet another hill. Abraxas, though, sprawls along the weedy mound of the first hill, partially obscured by the fence of a factory parking lot.

I was cheerfully dive-bombing the Mercedes past the gallery when Adam tapped my knee and RuthClaire cried, “Stop, Paul, you’re missing it!”

My first good look at Abraxas left me chilled and skeptical. A one-person show at this abandoned school, I mused, could hardly have any more cachet or impact than a violin recital in a garage in Butte, Montana. Adam’s show was clearly small potatoes. The movers and shakers of the Atlanta art community had granted him this venue because his work had nothing but its novelty (“Prehistoric human relic actually puts paint to canvas!”) to recommend it. Maybe they had given him this show as a courteous bow to RuthClaire, in the hope that she would contribute to the center’s funding. This decaying three-story shell of chipped brick and sagging drainpipes was Abraxas?

RuthClaire seemed to be monitoring my thoughts. “It’s better inside. You have to park around back.” The lot had already begun to fill. We inched along behind earlier arrivals before finding a space under an elm tree at the end of the studio wing. Quite a crowd. “The third-floor gallery has three main rooms,” RuthClaire explained. “Adam’s paintings occupy only one of them. Some of these people have come for the Kander photographs or the Haitian show.”

We got out and crossed the lot to a plywood ramp leading into the old school’s first-floor corridor. A security guard saluted RuthClaire and Adam and directed us up the cold inner stairs to the third floor. Little inside the place contradicted my first impression of it as a candidate for the wrecking ball. At last, a formidable door, preventing entry to the gallery. Adam pressed a buzzer on the crumbling wall next to the door.

“I need a password,” said a muffled male voice beyond it.

“Chief Noc-a-homa,” RuthClaire said. This was the name—the stage name, so to speak—of the Indian who served as the official mascot of the Atlanta Braves. It was also the necessary password. The door opened.

“Welcome to the Deep South franchise of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land,” said a tall, disheveled man in a lime-colored sweater and a gray corduroy jacket with elbow patches of such bituminous blackness that it looked as if they would leave smudges on any surface they touched. The wearer held his elbows close to his sides as if to keep from leaving charcoal blots here and there about the gallery. This was David Blau. He was nearly my age, but he exuded a boyish enthusiasm that seemed a permanent attribute of his character. RuthClaire made the introductions, and we went around the corner into the director’s huge, drafty “office.” In the middle of the room, a set of unfinished stairs climbed to a jutting mezzanine that may have been a jerrybuilt studio loft. A lumpy sofa squatted with its back to the steps.

People milled about between the sofa and its coffee table, between Blau’s desk and a metal desk piled high with tabloid art publications. Other people, wine glasses in hand, sat on either the steps or the sofa, chatting, laughing, enjoying themselves. Blau said they had a perfect right. Most of them had worked hard for the past ten days to make this opening possible. A woman in designer jeans and high heels approached with a tray of wine glasses and decanters of burgundy and white. Each of us took a stem, and even Adam drank, sipping at his glass rim as suavely as any cocktail-party veteran.

“Hey, Paul,” RuthClaire whispered, “still think this is the Siberia of Atlanta’s art world?”

Blau overheard her. “It’s the High Museum that’s the real Siberia. Every time I look at it I see a heap of trash-compacted igloos.”

“I like it,” RuthClaire said. “It’s a lovely building.”

“It’s cold,” Blau retorted. “Cold and sterile.”

“You’re not responding to the architecture, David. You’re responding to the fact that its exhibition policies are different from your own.”

“Southern artists can get shown in Amsterdam or Mexico City more easily than at the High,” Blau told me. “The High’s safe. Colorful abstracts with no troubling political or social messages. Artists safely dead or with one foot in some collector’s anonymous Swiss bank account.”

“It’s supposed to be safe, at least in comparison to Abraxas. It’s Abraxas that’s supposed to be dangerous.”

“Is Abraxas dangerous?” I asked Blau.

The Journal-Constitution art reporter—a young man with the clean-shaven look of a stockbroker—interrupted this conversation to ask RuthClaire if he could interview Adam. RuthClaire made a be-my-guest gesture and hooked arms with Blau and me to escort us in prankish lockstep out of the curator’s office and into the first gallery room. I glanced over my shoulder to see the reporter and Adam eyeing each other with polite perplexity. Adam’s, however, was feigned.

“That wasn’t fair,” I said. “That guy didn’t strike me as another Barrington.”

“He’ll survive,” RuthClaire said. “Maybe he knows sign language.”

“What about Adam? Isn’t it awkward for him, too?”

“He appreciates the situation’s humor. The reporter will blink first, believe me.”

Blau swept an arm at the walls of the spacious new chamber—careful, though, to keep his elbow tight against his side. “Is Abraxas dangerous? Hell, yes, Mr. Loyd.”

The white plaster, or Sheetrock, walls rose to a height of ten feet or so. Above them, extending another ten or twelve feet, were the cold red bricks of the old school’s outer walls. Ceiling fans with wooden blades, motionless now, hung down from the shadows of the loft space. Then I dropped my gaze to the banners and paintings of the Haitian exhibit.

“Witch-doctor territory,” Blau said, laughing. “One of the best collections of primitive Caribbean art ever put on display in the South. We did back flips to get it.”

“Expensive?”

Blau shook his hand at the wrist. “Under this administration, military bands receive more government money than does the entire National Endowment for the Arts.”

Dazzling tropical colors and bustling marketplaces danced in their frames on the Sheetrock. I liked what I saw. This painting was recognizably a portrait, that a landscape, this one a street scene. The banners at intervals among the paintings were more puzzling. They featured beaded or sequined designs on long strips of silk or velvet. Even so, their cabalistic patterns seemed right at home in a gallery billing itself Abraxas.

“What’s dangerous about these items?” I asked.

“By themselves, I guess, not much—unless vaudun, the Haitian voodoo religion, intimidates you. The banners you see here are what Haitian priests and witches call vevés. On the island itself, they’re laid out on the ground in meal or corn flour. They’re ceremonial drawings that play a role in creating trance states among vaudun initiates. Ours were made by real Haitians, but they’re only replicas of the vevés you might see in one of the canopy-covered temples during a real ceremony.”

“What’s dangerous about this exhibit,” RuthClaire said, “is that David and the others have put articles about the Duvalier government and our treatment of the Haitian boat people in odd places around the room. David’s originally from Brooklyn—a radical-pinko-commie with a monthly car payment.”

Blau put one arm across his midriff and bowed.

“What made you decide to go after Haitian art?” I asked.

“Adam did. He’s from a little island off the Haitian coast.”

“Paul knows,” RuthClaire said. “That’s how we got our surname.”

“Anyway,” Blau continued, “it seems that Adam’s people—the habiline remnant he was raised among—had occasional contact with members of the vaudun cult. The cult has its roots in West Africa, among the Arada-Dahomey Kingdoms, and even though Adam’s ancestors come from East Africa, they share their continent of origin and their negritude with the voodooists. The African-ness of the habilines and the majority of poor Haitians unites the two groups. It’s a mystical thing, I’m afraid.”

RuthClaire said, “Paul thought that a show in this old building was tantamount to deep-sixing an artist’s work in the Chattahoochee.”

“Not a bit,” said Blau, taking her arm. “Let’s show Mr. Loyd what really scares the more conservative members of our board.” We turned left into a small chamber with one strange, inward-curving wall, and I looked a question at RuthClaire.

“Eroticism,” she said. “Radical politics upsets fewer people than does graphic sex or nudity.”

“Especially if it has a racial or religious angle,” Blau added.

“Yeah, you get red faces, resignations, and withdrawn funding pledges.”

“Especially withdrawn funding pledges,” Blau said.

“Then why bother to show it?” I asked.

At which point I discovered that on the chamber’s curved wall, and on the two long straight walls connecting with it, were arrayed thirty or forty large black-and-white photographs in simple chromium frames. A piece of Plexiglas as big as an automobile’s windshield hung eight feet off the floor in the room’s center, and inside it was the word

in thick, emphatic red letters, with the photographer’s name—Maria-Katherine Kander—in smaller characters beneath it. The photos jumped out like a sudden angry slap.

“Holy Christ,” I murmured.

“They’re best taken in small doses,” Blau told me. “But in here, you’ll have to prepare for a full-scale assault. Have a gander. We’ll stay out of your way.”

He and RuthClaire withdrew so that I could prowl along the curved wall looking at Ms. Kander’s outrageous photographs. The first I stopped at, and studied, showed an angular black woman lying naked on her back on a sterile white sheet. Stacked between her legs, and in turgid piles around her thighs and belly, lay at least a dozen tiger-striped watermelons, a gang-banging team of watermelons. The expression on the woman’s face suggested nothing short of complacent ecstasy.

I moved on.

Another photograph was a frontal nude of a black man from the shoulders down and the thighs up. This faceless man had a daunting erection. At an upward angle paralleling that of his hard on, he gripped the ebony barrel of a submachine-gun. I blinked and moved on. Next, an anorexic white woman in high heels and leather panties was lowering her mouth to the head of a microphone held out to her by a disdainful rock musician with an electric guitar draped across his body. Yet another photograph featured a sunken-eyed man in concentration-camp garb, a Star of David stenciled on his arm band, gripping the bars of a bank vault. Ingots of gold bullion—like so many loaves of gilded bread—loaded the shelves behind him.

An even more elaborate photograph showed a priest in a cassock speaking to a congregation of naked parishioners, his fingers crossed behind him. Some of the people in the pews were fondling each other, while a few elderly worshipers, pathetic in their wrinkles, frowned or slept. At the altar below the priest—the picture had been taken from behind his head—kneeled a chimpanzee in black tie and tails, a top hat on its head. I wondered at the length of time it must have required to stage that one.

Blau approached. “What’s the verdict?”

“They’re actually offensive. They seem to be trying to offend me.”

“They are.”

“They succeed.”

“If you say so,” Blau replied, “yes, they do.”

“Succeed in offending me?”

“In offending you and in fulfilling the artist’s intention.”

“That intention being to offend?”

RuthClaire appeared at my elbow. “You’ve got it.”

“Good,” I said. “Until just now I was pretty sure you guys would regard my taking offense as reprehensibly unhip.”

“No,” Blau conceded, “they’re definitely offensive.”

RuthClaire nodded agreement. “Intrinsically offensive.”

“Offensive in an absolute sense,” Blau added.

We stood in the gallery room looking at the definitely offensive, intrinsically offensive—offensive in an almost absolute sense—photographs of Maria-Katherine Kander. Our abashed reverence before these disgusting artifacts began to irk me. Their “eroticism”—I hadn’t seen anything that truly qualified—seemed to consist mostly of exposed flesh and simulated acts of fetishistic sodomy. Despite RuthClaire’s implied disclaimer, I saw the pictures as pornographic political statements. They were racist, misogynist, fascist, anticlerical, and maybe a dozen other things too twisted or subtle to pinpoint. Antievolutionary? Pro-consumerism? I had no idea. But their offensiveness was beyond question.

“What’s the goddamn point?”

“Paul, try not to get ridiculously worked up over this.”

“You mean there are degrees of offense that it’s unhip to take? I thought I could get as goddamn offended as I liked.” I appealed to Blau. “All I’m asking is, What’s the goddamn point of taking pictures that are meant to offend?”

“Really,” he replied, “it would be out of bounds for me to speak for Ms. Kander. Worse, you’d probably take it as some sort of definitive statement or explanation of her intent, which wouldn’t be fair to either the artist or you.”

“Criminy!” I said. “Who is this gal? Her name sounds German. Is she a Nazi?”

RuthClaire, who had an ostensibly calming hand on my arm, said, “I don’t know her ethnic background. She’s from Tennessee.”

“She doesn’t live in Atlanta,” I hazarded. “She’d be an idiot to show such crap here—in this neighborhood, in a city with a black mayor—and try to live here, too.”

“She’s based in New York City,” Blau said, “but she could live in Atlanta if she wished. Atlantans are more knowing about contemporary art than you might think.”

“Unlike your average hick from Beulah Fork?”

“Paul,” RuthClaire said, “let’s go see Adam’s work.” She put a gentle pressure on my arm. “Before the crowd comes in.”

“Wait a minute. I want to know David’s interpretation of Ms. Kander’s intent.”

“But that would be to preempt—”

“RuthClaire, for God’s sake, let me talk to the man.” I rounded on Blau. “Look, I’ve got a mind of my own. You won’t unduly influence my own final stance. I’m trying to understand—to appreciate—these photographs. Isn’t that what an exhibit is for, to prompt greater understanding and appreciation of an artist’s work?”

Blau surrendered to my tirade. “Okay, you’re passionate about this. You deserve an answer.”

I waited.

“I think Kander’s attempts to offend are motivated by a desire to heighten our outrage at the stereotypes she presents. It’s satire, Mr. Loyd, not a call to embrace what you see as, God forbid, accurate depictions of the people involved. Her technique forces you to reassess your basic attitude about each image. The art’s not only in her skills as a photographer, but in the outrageous scenes she stages for the camera. I get off on that. The young lady’s droll.”

“That’s one word for it,” I said. “But is that how everybody who walks in here will finally interpret her work?”

“Oh, no. Some will take one look, turn around, and walk out. Others won’t see anything but naked flesh. For them, it’s pornographic, and they’ll either enjoy it or scorn it as such.”

I waved at the walls. “Is this stuff for sale?”

“Well, prints are. That’s how Ms. Kander makes her living. By today’s standards, they’re dirt cheap—but Kander’s popular and sells in volume.”

“Who’s she popular with? Voyeurs? The artsy-fartsy crowd?”

“Both, I guess. There’s no form to fill out to buy one. So far as I know, you don’t even have to be twenty-one.”

“Where would you hang these things? The bathroom?”

“That’s up to you. Are you thinking of ordering one?”

“Hell, no!” I virtually shouted.

Adam arrived in the company of a staff member named Bonnie Carlin, but I was still hot about the rub-your-nose-in-your-own-smug-prejudices strategy of Kander’s “art.” Everything Blau had said about it made a kind of backasswards sense, but I kept thinking that, for all her cleverness and technical skill, she was really accomplishing the Unnecessary, often for the Uncomprehending, and almost always with a (pardon me) Drollery that bespoke a superior smugness all her own.

Phooey, as Lester Maddox used to like to say.

Bonnie Carlin delivered a message—it was time to let the clamoring crowd in—and departed. We, too, abandoned the M.-K. Kander Room, crossing the corridor into the third and final gallery room, where Adam’s paintings hung. This room was like the first, but not so large. A single darkened studio loft brooded above us. Below it, all four walls seemed to resonate with the vitality and prehistoric wildness that Adam—who had even begun to wear deodorant—would no longer permit himself to reveal in his day-to-day relationships with others.

I saw the huge barbed baobab that he had painted at Paradise Farm. I saw rolling silver-brown mounds that could have been either the Lolitabu foothills or a herd of headless mammoths on a dusty African plain. I saw grass fires, volcanic eruptions, jags of icy lightning, and a crowd of silhouetted human (or semihuman) forms either fighting or feasting or copulating. I also saw a series of ambiguous mother-and-child portraits that could have been of RuthClaire and Tiny Paul, or of a baboon female and her capering infant, or even of a genderless adult attacking a smaller figure of the same unidentifiable, but monkeylike, species. There was also a painting of a hominid creature with the head of a dog or a jackal or a hyena, and around its head there glowed a brilliant orange-red light. The exhibit as a whole communicated energy and excitement.

By my standards, very good stuff.

Demurely, Adam hung back, his hands behind him. His eyes shifted from side to side, as if he was fearful that I would ridicule this painting or take umbrage at something and walk out. At Paradise Farm, he’d had no such qualms. Here, though, as the only artist on the premises, he appeared to be suffering a terrific bout of the butterflies.

“They’re good,” I told him. “I like ’em all.”

Adam smiled. His lips drew back to reveal teeth and gums. Then, flustered, he pursed them shut again.

By the terms of his contract with Abraxas, Adam had to stick around long enough to meet some of the general public at the opening. Members of the board of directors who had not been able to attend the reception would want to greet him, as would some of the wealthier patrons who always arrived late. Moreover, Blau encouraged his artists to talk to students, impulse visitors, reporters from the Atlanta papers, and other media people. Temperamental aloofness could hurt fund-raising efforts.

The reception officially ended, and the crowd swarmed in. Adam and RuthClaire withdrew to Gallery Three to receive congratulations and autograph Abraxas flyers. I retreated to Blau’s office and poured myself the last half-glass of Asti Spumante from the only decanter not already empty. Then I drank it up and wandered into Gallery One.

Haitian art was scoring heavily tonight. I had to reposition my shoulders every few steps to slide through the pockets of people discussing it. Gallery Two, featuring Kander’s work, was also packed. Flushed with admiration or chagrin, two women squeezed out of that gallery into the hall.

“It’s a wonder the place hasn’t been raided,” one of them said.

“Goodness, Doreen, the woman’s making a statement.”

I followed Doreen and her scandalized friend into Gallery Three. The Montarazes, huddled together for mutual protection, stood at the front of a ladder-like contraption giving access to the loft overhead. The sight of one particular hanger-on surrounding them brought me up short.

There before me—in checked shirt, green knit tie, dun pants, and fake suede jacket—slouched Brian Nollinger, the anthropologist from Emory, the Judas who had tried to turn Adam over to an agent of the INS. He had shaved his Fu Manchu, but his granny glasses and his air of unflappable belonging—“Why would anyone be unhappy to see me here?”—identified him more surely to me than a fingerprint check. And it was no comfort remembering that, but for my own jealous meddling, Nollinger might not have come into any of our lives. In a sense, I had created him… as an ongoing annoyance, if not as a human being.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Nollinger turned. “Hello, Mr. Loyd. I came to see the show.”

“How long does it take you to see it?”

“Well—”

“You don’t know a damn thing about art. You’re the kind of gallerista who thinks Winslow Homer was a blind Greek poet.”

“Look, if it’s okay with you, I came to apologize.”

“For calling me an enemy of science?” RuthClaire asked. “For accusing me of keeping my own private slave?”

For a moment, Nollinger looked profoundly embarrassed. “Yes, ma’am, I regret that. I was feuding with Alistair Patrick Blair.”

I shooed off the other hangers-on. “A scholarly feud excuses you of slinging mud at an innocent woman?”

“I had no idea she’d marry Adam, Mr. Loyd. At least I believed the creature—the person—under her roof was a living representative of Homo habilis. That was more than Blair was willing to concede. Give me that much credit.”

“Are you still shooting monkeys up with No-Dōz?”

That was a rabbit punch. The whites of Nollinger’s weary eyes swung toward me. “I concluded those researches long ago. I’ve been trying to obtain a grant for some field work outside the States. But this isn’t an easy time to find funding.”

“So you showed up here to put the pinch on RuthClaire and Adam, I take it.”

He shook his head, less in denial than in pity for the depth of my pettiness and suspicion. But one amazing consequence of this exchange was that RuthClaire had begun to turn a sympathetic eye on the man. She lacked the constitution for a sustained grudge, a character trait from which I, too, had benefited.

Nollinger gestured at the painting nearest us. “Another of my reasons for coming was professional. I’ve always taken an interest in documented cases of the creative impulse in collateral species.”

The poor fool was digging his own pitfall. I decided to lend him a hand. “What kind of cases, Dr. Nollinger?”

“Well, some years back, a chimpanzee in the London Zoo learned to draw and paint. He became proficient at putting circles and crosslike designs on canvas.”

“A chimpanzee?” RuthClaire said.

“That’s right. I believe his name was Congo. They gave him his own show. He even sold some paintings. The literature calls it the first documented exhibit of subhuman art in history.”

RuthClaire’s eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to say that this is the second?”

Nollinger was not an utter idiot. His face turned red. “N-no, of course not. It’s just that… well, w-w-we’re all primates, you know. The impulse for self-expression may be b-basic to every primate species.”

Abruptly, Adam turned and climbed the wrought-iron ladder into the gallery loft. Once there, he squatted in the shadows like a lissome Quasimodo.

“Go away, please,” RuthClaire said.

“Wait a minute,” Nollinger said. “This is a public exhibit. You can’t run me off.”

“Have you seen the photographic exhibit?” I asked. Mindful of the time I had hit him, he took a step backward. “You’ll like ’em. Each and every one of them is an insult to people of taste and intelligence.”

“I’m trying to talk to the Montarazes.”

“You’re going into the Kander exhibit.” I turned Nollinger around and headed him toward Gallery Two. He tried to yank away, but I applied a bouncer hold and marched him out.

Fear of creating a scene prevented Nollinger from resisting me further. I took advantage of that scruple—at least he had one—to deposit him in front of a photograph of an American Plains Indian with an empty fifth of Wild Turkey in one hand and the blonde scalp of a white girl-woman in the other. This comatose nymphet wore only a black-lace teddy and lay prostrate at the chief’s feet.

“Here,” I said: “Another fascinating instance of the primate creative impulse.”

This photo, and the others around it, mesmerized Brian Nollinger, and I left him there in the crowded gallery room.

David Blau helped us escape Abraxas without running a gauntlet of reporters. We used an auxiliary stairwell to get away, emerging in the parking lot to find that it had stopped raining. Water glistened on the asphalt. The trees dripped diamonds. In one patch of sky, a few fretful stars struggled to blink aside the cloud cover.

We drove to Patrick’s, a restaurant in Little Five Points, and asked for a table away from the long storefront windows facing Moreland Avenue. Here we ordered more white wine, with a fresh spinach salad and a breast-of-chicken entrée. Because Nollinger had rained on Adam’s parade, we had a hard time sustaining conversation.

“Consider the source and forget it,” I told Adam. “Your opening was packed. How often does that happen?”

“Rarely,” RuthClaire said. “Not often at all.”

“There, you see? It’s a triumph, Adam. Forget about that guy’s fatuous faux pas.”

Adam wiped his fingers on a linen napkin. Leaning back in his chair, he signed gracefully in the candle-lit dining room. Adam (according to RuthClaire’s translation) did not regard the turnout at Abraxas as a personal triumph. At least half the people there had taken advantage of the respectability implicit in a gallery opening to ogle Kander’s photos. The most knowledgeable and devoted gallery patrons, Adam went on, had come for the Haitian exhibit. Those who had come to see his paintings (people like Nollinger, for instance) were motivated less by faith in the potential importance of Adam’s work than by curiosity. What sort of Rorschach blotches would a living hominid anachronism put to canvas?

Half of Adam’s meal remained untouched. RuthClaire gripped him fondly on one side of his neck and massaged the taut sinews with a gentle hand. He closed his eyes, enduring this display of affection as if unworthy of it. Once upon a time, I knew, I would have killed to experience such tenderness at RuthClaire’s hands. Once upon a time? From my jacket I removed the letters that the Montarazes had sent me in December. I shook out Adam’s and tilted it in the candle glow so that I could read it.

“‘One day this year Miss RuthClaire may ask you to come see about her seeing about me. Some doctors at Emory are plotting now a surgery to humanize me for this time and place. Do please come when she asks.’” Gallantly, I did not read the parts offering to reimburse me for my time and authorizing his wife and me to use the same bed if we both agreed to the “niceness” of that arrangement. “Any comments?”

“What do you want to know?” RuthClaire finally asked.

“What kind of surgery? When’s it supposed to happen? When will you need me? Why so secretive?”

“You’ll come?”

“I’ve already said so.”

RuthClaire looked at Adam. He nodded a curt okay. “This summer,” she said. “It’s exacting plastic surgery. The point is to enable Adam to speak. It involves reshaping the entire buccal cavity—without deforming his facial features.” She gave Adam a smile. “Hey, fella, I love that face.” To me, she said, “There’s work to be done on his vocal cords and larynx, too. Don’t ask me to explain it all. It’s already required several X-ray sessions, some plaster castings, and more psycho-medical sessions than you’d expect a candidate for a sex change to sit through.”

“Adam’s going to be able to talk?” I turned my hand into a gibbering puppet.

“That’s the basic idea.”

I sat back in my chair. This particular basic idea had never occurred to me. Adam an orator? Picturing him talking—like Brad Barrington or Dwight “Happy” McElroy—unnerved me. What impact would the ability have on him? On others? Would my acceptance of him—my commitment to him as a friend—diminish as he asserted his own personality and opinions through the medium of direct speech? Did my regard for Adam have its source in heretofore disguised feelings of superiority?

“What’s the matter, Paul?”

“How much is this going to cost?”

“Lots.”

“That’s what I figured.”

“For something this crucial, we’ve got it to spend.” She eyed me shrewdly. “You don’t approve?”

“It sounds great. Adam and I will be able to commiserate about the weather.”

What was wrong with me? I’d accepted so much else about Adam—his marriage to RuthClaire, his biological compatibility with my former wife, his developing literacy, and even the half-pathetic sincerity of his spiritual yearnings. Why couldn’t I accept his desire to talk? To put my selfish reluctance in the best possible light, maybe I had a faint intimation of all the trouble looming ahead for us.

RuthClaire paid the bill, but I insisted on leaving the tip.

We returned in my car to the sprawling Montaraz bordello-cum-boarding house on Hurt Street. It was too late to play with Tiny Paul, but when we looked in on him sleeping in his bassinet, I was startled to see his dreaming features betray a hint of the feral self-sufficiency that only a moment ago, leaving Patrick’s, I had seen in his father’s face. All babies have something endearingly pongid about them, but there in the sheen of his night light my godson’s resemblance to a “collateral primate”—a baby gorilla!—brought the forests of Uganda’s Virunga Mountains right into a bedroom near Inman Park.

Life is strange, I thought, and I kissed the kid so that we could withdraw and leave him to his sleep.

RuthClaire pointed me to a second-story guestroom wallpapered with a repeating pattern of pale green bamboo shoots, and Adam nodded a friendly goodnight on his way downstairs to drive Pam Sorrells home. Alone, sitting on my bed, a paperback novel in my hands, I thought of Adam’s naive invitation to share a bed with his wife while he was in the hospital—if, of course, we both agreed to the “niceness” of the sharing. How could I tell RuthClaire’s new husband that tonight I wanted her beside me not to ravish but to cherish, not to penetrate but to pet? These days, away from the West Bank, it was loneliness rather than sexual desire that ate at me, and that, of course, was why I kept myself so busy. At last I put my book down, heel-and-toed my shoes off, turned out the light, and stretched out to await the onset of sleep. It delayed and delayed, but eventually, two or maybe even three hours later, came.

I spent Wednesday with the Montarazes, most of which we devoted to a tour of the High Museum on Peachtree Street. On Thursday, I returned to Beulah Fork.

Business continued to boom. People came in and went out, and so did money. I yelled at Livia George, she glared at me in insulted contempt, the dristles of winter gave way to the hurricanes of spring, soldiers of twenty or more nations died in almost all the senseless ways it is possible to die, dining-room help arrived and departed, and the president of the United States asked Congress to okay funds for a defense force of mutant giant pandas with which to protect the Aleutian Islands from Soviet invasion. Something like that. I was too busy to pay more than passing heed to the news.

At last the summons came. I got to Atlanta on the day after Adam had undergone the six-hour surgical procedure designed to give him the ability to speak. I would have been there for the operation itself but RuthClaire delayed asking me to come until the next morning, when it was already clear that her husband was out of danger. Whether all the tinkering would have the desired effect remained a question of prime concern, but not whether he would live or die. All this, defying the possibility of a tap, RuthClaire had told me in a phone call—but when I reached Emory Hospital, I was still angry about not having had the chance to sit with her during the surgery.

RuthClaire met me in a corridor below the pagoda-like parking tower where I had left my car. She wore a white blouse with scrollish cutouts in the collar, a seersucker skirt, and a pair of Italian sandals. She had a baby-carrier on her back, but it was empty because Tiny Paul, not yet nine months old, stood at her knee gripping one of her fingers with a tentative hand.

I could not believe it. T. P., whom I’d last seen zonked in a bassinet, was walking. He wore navy-blue shorts, a powder-blue shirt, and a pair of minuscule tennis shoes with racing chevrons. There was nothing even remotely gorillaish about his appearance today. No baby fat, no leathery sheen on his forehead. As I neared him and his mother along the corridor, he eyed me with the solemnity of a pint-sized state legislator.

“Don’t start in.” RuthClaire raised her free hand in warning.

“Everything’s fine.” I knelt in front of the kid to give him a gentle poke in the breadbasket. His gums pulled away from his teeth in a… well, a smarl, which is to say a smile and a snarl so perfectly meshed that they are identical. “He’s really grown. How long’s he been walking?”

“Since April, Paul. He’s a dynamo. All the activity has slimmed him down.”

“Walking at five months? Does he talk, too?”

That one earned me a rebuke. “His dad’s just had surgery to allow him to speak, and you’re asking me if our son’s talking yet? Do you want to make me cry?”

“RuthClaire—”

“Some children don’t talk until they’re two or more. It’s nothing to fret about.”

“Listen, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“Come on,” she said angrily. “Let’s go see Adam.”

We averted an argument by walking to the elevators at the far end of the echoing corridor. T. P. kept up with us with an effortless trot, like an Ethiopian conscript of the 1940s jogging to the front. Upstairs, the nurses at the nurses’ station got our names and let us proceed down the hall to Adam’s room. It was a long walk. I used it to start to berate my ex for not calling me sooner, but she cut me off with a recitation of all the people who’d already come by to see her and lend moral support.

“You don’t need me anymore, do you?”

“Give that man a cigar. He finally digs the full implications of our divorce.”

“Why call me at all, then?”

“Adam thought you should be here. He’s trying to be the alpha-male of our household, appointing a lieutenant until he’s well enough to return.” Like an invisible tide of warm honey, a mellifluous laugh came rolling out of Adam’s room.

“What the hell was that? Surely, not Adam?”

“We’ve got a visitor. He stopped by yesterday, too. I’d’ve run him off if Adam hadn’t asked me before the operation to let the clown come calling.” RuthClaire set Tiny Paul down, and the kid trotted into his father’s room. “Come see.”

We entered the room after the precocious toddler, who was already in the male visitor’s arms. Adam lay on the bed beside them, his mummy-wrapped face tilted toward the door. A pole-mounted IV bottle dripped glucose into his bloodstream.

“Paul Loyd,” RuthClaire said, “meet the Right Reverend Dwight McElroy.”

Most television evangelists, I had long ago decided, looked like affluent mobile-home salesmen. An eye tic or an unruly forelock of pomaded hair was the sole outward manifestation of the emotional kink that kept their motors going. But McElroy, whom I’d watched for only a few fascinated weeks on his syndicated Great Gospel Giveaway, did not fit this mold. Prematurely gray (or post-pubescently silver), he had the aristocratic mien of a European count. At the same time, though, I had no trouble dressing him out in basketball togs and putting him at the power-forward position for a team like the Celtics. He was too old for that, of course, but appeared in great shape—lean, muscular, alert, and, in spite of his lank (not blown-dry) silver hair, facially collegiate. Carrying T. P., the leader of the rigorously Protestant but otherwise scrupulously nondenominational Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc., strode toward me with his hand out. When he smiled, the count gave way to the suggestion of a farm kid come to the big city in a borrowed suit.

“Just call me Happy. None of this Right Reverend business, now. Sometimes it flat wears me out, Paul.”

“Me, too,” RuthClaire said.

I shook the proffered hand. “I’m not a fan, Happy. Forgive me for saying so.”

“I’m not a fisher of fans, Paul. I’m a fisher of souls.”

“Any bites?”

“They’re always biting, Paul, always just waiting to be fed.” (I knew the feeling.) “That’s why I try to keep my lines in the water.”

“And your hooks out?”

He knew he was being baited (as the Elizabethans baited bears, not as a southern angler readied a worm for skewering), but he neither laughed foolishly nor surrendered outright to my barb. He gave me a smile and bounced T. P. lightly against his flank. “And my hooks out,” he echoed me. “The kind that don’t tear, that lift one up into the sun.” He smiled again, as if to illustrate his meaning with a show of teeth.

I turned to RuthClaire. What was this joker doing here? A little more than a year ago, he’d condemned her from the pulpit as a twentieth-century sodomite, speaking with great force on two matters about which he undoubtedly remained acutely ignorant, evolutionary theory and the exact nature of RuthClaire and Adam’s relationship. Did the man have no shame? I stated my objections to his presence and asked him if he did.

“I don’t feel out of place here, Paul. It’s not possible for me to hate the sinner as much as I do the sin. In fact, I don’t hate the sinner at all. I love him.”

Adam’s eyes pleaded with RuthClaire to forgive their visitor—this rich, famous fool for Christ—the foolish words that had wounded her so deeply a year ago. T. P. had begun to squirm. McElroy set him down.

Then he said, “They say your husband’s a habiline, Mrs. Montaraz. What is that, for mercy’s sake? From three states away, ma’am, I supposed everybody was making a fuss over some naked monkey out of some hard-to-get-to foreign jungle. ‘A surviving representative of a prehuman species,’ that one fella said. Well, I didn’t believe that then, and I don’t believe it now.”

He gestured at Adam, prostrate under a stiff hospital sheet. “That’s not a habiline. That’s not a ape. That’s a man. The proof is you married him. The further proof of it’s this gift of God hanging on your skirt. And people, Mrs. Montaraz, I can’t he’p but love. I love Adam. I love you. I love your little boy. If I seemed to dump hellfire on y’all last year, it was because I didn’t yet know you and Adam for the fine people you are.

“It’s likewise because I supposed—along with millions of other folks—just what the liberal press and those high-profile network TV folks wanted us to suppose, namely, that Adam was a ape—a naked ape—because it made a good story. Well, he’s not a ape, but a man. And the only sin either of you was guilty of is that of an appearance of impropriety in the eyes of the press and of some who, I admit, should’ve known better’n to believe what we saw in our papers and heard on our TVs. So please forgive me for preaching you and Adam up as an instance of our troubled country’s moral decay. Even Ol’ Happy’s human, ma’am.”

“Really?” I said. “What if, instead of forgiving you, they sued?”

McElroy flicked me an annoyed look, but again importuned RuthClaire: “I’m quite serious about the fullness of my sorrow over this. On the next Gospel Giveaway I do in Rehoboth, I’ll make you a re-tract, a earnest and thorough re-tract. It’d be my real pleasure.” He paused to assess the effect of this offer on RuthClaire. “Of course, it’s my duty to do it, too, but it’d be my pleasure as well. I mean that.”

Wearily, RuthClaire removed the empty baby-carrier from her back and slid it gently across the floor to the foot of Adam’s bed. Then she crossed the room and sat down in the folding chair that McElroy had been using. T. P. trotted after. She collared him and absent-mindedly knuckled his miniature Afro.

The evangelist spread his hands. “Well? Can you forgive me?”

“It’d be my pleasure, Mr. McElroy, if you’d just leave Adam and me out of your broadcast.”

“Nothing else?”

“That’d be plenty. Oh, you could find Paul a chair. And one for yourself if you’re going to stick around any longer.”

McElroy smiled, did a heel click, and departed to look for two chairs. I shuffled to the bed, grabbed Adam’s toes through the sheet, and wobbled them affectionately back and forth. He smiled up at me with his eyes.

Considering the ease of his task, McElroy was gone a while. RuthClaire used his absence to fill me in. The man had come to the Emory campus at the invitation of the Institute for World Evangelism at Candler Theological Seminary. He’d been in the city three days, speaking to seminary students and faculty at a variety of venues, including the William R. Cannon Chapel, one of the auditoria in White Hall, and the sanctuary of the Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church across North Decatur Road from Emory Village. Adam had deliberately scheduled his surgery to coincide with McElroy’s visit. Indeed, he’d written the evangelist a letter explaining the operation’s purpose, asking him to look in on RuthClaire during the procedure, and requesting, too, a visit from the busy Right Reverend once Adam entered a recovery room. He had improved his chances for a favorable response by including a $250 contribution to McElroy’s television ministry. He had also worked to pique the man’s curiosity (an instance, given the national appetite for news of the Montarazes, of almost touching overkill) by outlining his largely unguided religious researches over the past ten months. Now, though, he wanted an authoritative pronouncement about his spiritual state. Did he, or did he not, have a “soul”?

McElroy had replied that of course he did. On the other hand, he ought to give over the Biblically unsound, and soul-destroying, notion that he belonged to a prehuman species out of which yet another prehuman species had arisen, etc. A belief like that, denying the straightforward creation account in Genesis, put the soul in mortal jeopardy. Adam was obviously sincere in his questing, but sadly misled about which direction to go by today’s God-lost scientists and technocrats. McElroy would gladly counsel with Adam, even pray with him, while he recovered at Emory Hospital.

“He wrote McElroy?” I asked incredulously. “Sent him money?”

“Oh, yes. Adam’s keeping his options open. He’s written the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the chief elder of the Mormons, two or three ayatollahs in Iran, and a couple of voodoo artist-priests who exhibited work at Abraxas in February. If it meditates, sacrifices, or prays, Adam’s written it. Most of his correspondents reply. We have a scrapbook. We may need another one.”

Adam worked his hands free of the sheet and tried to sign. By appearing to focus his will, he made these gestures distinct enough for RuthClaire to interpret. She must give over her hostility to McElroy, he advised, for the man was there on his own valuable time to affirm Adam’s humanity.

With a folding chair and a chair with a cushion, McElroy returned. On the cushion rested a shiny bedpan in which two or three inches of water shimmered under the room’s fluorescents. McElroy set this chair down without sloshing any water out of the pan. The metal chair he gave to me to unfold for myself. Then he placed the bedpan—with a hokey flourish—on the food tray that swung out from Adam’s bed.

“This is distilled water,” he said. “I got it at the nurses’ station, and it’s physically pure, free of germs and pollutants.”

“Can the same be said of the bedpan?” RuthClaire asked.

“Oh, yes, ma’am. It’s been in an autoclave.”

“Well, Adam’s already had a sponge bath, Reverend McElroy. I gave him one this morning. There’s no need to repeat it now.”

“Has he been baptized?”

“What?”

“Has he received the sacrament of ultimate cleanliness?”

“I’m not sure I—”

“Has he been washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”

“From a bedpan?” I wondered aloud.

McElroy laughed. “The Lord and I make do with what’s available. By remaining unbaptized, Adam has begun to doubt his possession of the soul that even now he’s in danger of leaving to the Prince of Darkness forever. I can’t allow that, sir.”

Her hands on T. P.’s shoulders, RuthClaire stared at the evangelist as if he had proposed dousing Adam with lighter fluid. “This is in the worst possible taste,” she finally managed.

“You may be right, Mrs. Montaraz. Damnation has the weight of public favor on its side nowadays—it’s the in thing to shoot for—but your husband isn’t one to go along with the crowd simply because it’s a crowd. Ask him what he wants.”

Realizing that McElroy had played an unanswerable trump, RuthClaire pulled Tiny Paul onto her lap and numbly shook her head.

“I’ll ask him, then.” Looking down on Adam, McElroy said, “Do you wish to receive the holy benison of baptism?”

Adam made the gesture signifying Yes.

RuthClaire shook her head again, not believing that her husband would consent to what she regarded as a parody of the baptismal rite—but loving him too much to forbid him to continue.

McElroy closed his eyes. He asked God to further purify the water in the bedpan, immersed his hands, lifted them dripping, carried them to Adam’s head, and dramatically brought them down on the faint sagittal crest dividing his skull into hemispheres. “Be careful,” RuthClaire warned. “Adam’s jaw is a jigsaw puzzle of fitted pieces. If you slow his healing, I’ll…”

She stopped, but the warning got through McElroy’s devout trance to his understanding. Crooking his elbows, easing the pressure on Adam’s head, he intoned, “Adam Montaraz, husband and father, by the authority invested in me as a minister of the gospel, I baptize you in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

“Amen,” I said. The word slipped out, impelled, I think, by an unconscious memory of my slipshod Congregationalist upbringing in Tocqueville.

Theoretically a believer, RuthClaire gave me a dirty look.

McElroy wiped his hands. “Mrs. Montaraz, please know that I’ve also lifted a prayer for Adam’s speedy recovery.”

“Thank you.”

“What about that handsome boy there?”

“What about him?”

“Has he been baptized?”

RuthClaire folded her arms around T. P. “You’ve performed your ceremony for the day. It’s time for you to leave.”

“Delay could be a mortal mistake, ma’am. It could cause—”

“He’s hardly in danger. Baptists wait until they’re twelve or thirteen, don’t they?”

“You’re not Baptists, ma’am. Nor are we at the Greater Christian Constituency. We embrace the denomination, of course, but my own doctrinal origins are Methodist. We’re brother and sister, Mrs. Montaraz.”

Adam began to sign, feebly but urgently.

“No,” RuthClaire told him. “Absolutely not. If it’s done, it’ll be done in a church, with a congregation and a robed minister.” When Adam persisted, she bore down: “You’re overstepping what you have a right to ask! You’re not the only one in this room responsible for Tiny Paul’s spiritual dispensation!”

McElroy said, “There’s a Biblical injunction commanding wives to—”

“Get the holy hell out of here!” RuthClaire yelled. T. P. burrowed into her armpit. Adam’s eyes fluttered shut. Like me, he had probably never heard her utter an epithet stronger than “Heck!” or “Drat!”

McElroy appeared ready to keep the argument going, but a portly man and a youth in his early twenties stopped at Adam’s doorway, distracting him. The younger of the two men reproduced McElroy’s lank physique almost exactly.

“Daddy,” he said, “Dr. Siebert’s come to take you to your next lecture over in White.”

“Adam, stay in touch, hear?” McElroy said cheerily. “It’s been a joy, sanctifying you in Christ’s sweet name. The boy next time, mebbe.”

“Take the stupid bedpan with you,” RuthClaire said.

McElroy gave her a thin smile and spoke to his son: “Come get the font, Duncan. I’m finished with it for today.”

Duncan McElroy obeyed, retrieving the bedpan from the cantilevered tray and carrying it out of the room like a wise man bearing a thurible of perfumed incense. The evangelist gave a perfunctory salute, then followed Duncan and Dr. Siebert out of the room—off toward the elevator and another elevating session with some of Candler’s theology students.

RuthClaire, wrung out, began very quietly to cry.

Over the next week, RuthClaire and I visited Adam daily, spelling each other when one of us needed a break. Livia George managed the West Bank in my absence. I drove down twice to check up on her, but her efficient handling of matters made me feel about as useful there as a training wheel on a tank.

Adam improved rapidly, but his doctors still forbade the removal of his plastic chin support and the bandages holding it in place. So he took nourishment intravenously and talked with us with sign language. Also, he had a lap-sized electric typewriter that he had taught himself to use by the hunt-and-peck method.

McElroy returned to Louisiana the day after Adam’s baptism, but one unsettling consequence of the Bedpan Ceremony was the habiline’s frequent recourse to prayer. The Lord’s Prayer. The prayer of St. Francis of Assisi beginning, “Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.” Any number of Old Testament psalms. “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.” The Pilot’s Prayer. The Newspaper Columnist’s Prayer. A few obscure Eastern supplications, including Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and of course Sufic formulae. And a small anthology of weird but occasionally moving prayers—petitionary prayers—that Adam had written himself.

Indeed, although Adam had accepted baptism in Christ Jesus’s name, the prayer ritual in his hospital room had an ecumenical cast. Here is one of his prayers, typed out on the little machine he used to engage in animated dialogues with us:

After the baptism, every visit to Adam’s room concluded with a prayer. Once, I asked him what he believed he was accomplishing with such ritual.

On his lap machine, he typed: THERE IS NO TRUE RELIGION WITHOUT PRAYER.

That led me to question the value of religion, true or not, and Adam struggled to answer that one, too. Finally, he typed this compound word: SELF-DEFINITION.

He found it amusing that the value of a belief in a Higher Power had its ultimate ground in one’s own ego. Was that a contradiction? No, not really. A paradox? Probably. But if Adam felt a greater sense of urgency about his relationship with God than did most twentieth-century human beings, the ambiguity of his status vis-à-vis both God and his two-legged fellows fueled that feeling.

“You know,” I told him after reading his “Gut and Mind” prayer, “you’re assuming a rigid line between the ensouled and the soulless, human beings and humanoid animals.”

Go on, he signaled.

“You’ve made it an either/or proposition. But what if there’s a gray area where the transition takes place?”

LIKE THE DUSK SEPARATING DAY FROM NIGHT?

“Exactly.”

I read his next haltingly written response over his shoulder: I UNDERSTAND, MISTER PAUL, THE BASIS OF HOW YOU ARGUE HERE. THE WORRY ABOUT WHAT AN EARLY HOMINID IS, BEAST OR PERSON. BUT MANY THINGS, I THINK, IT TAKES TO MAKE A CREATURE HUMAN, AND IF A CREATURE IS MISSING ONLY ONE OR TWO, I DO NOT BELIEVE IT IS RIGHT TO SAY, AH HA, YOU DO NOT BELONG TO HUMAN SPECIES.

“Okay, Adam, if you believe that human beings have souls, then anyone on this side—our side—of the transitional area has one. You’re safe because… well, because you’ve successfully interbred with a human woman.”

IT IS NOT SO EASY

“Why not?”

BECAUSE A CREATURE GOING THROUGH ANIMALNESS TO HUMANITY—IN THEORY, I TELL YOU—GOES THROUGH A MAPPABLE SORT OF EVOLUTIONARY JOURNEY. BUT A SOUL DOES NOT DIVIDE OR BREAK. YOU CANNOT GET CHANGE FOR IT. YOU HAVE ONE IN YOUR POCKET OR YOU DO NOT. WHERE DOES GOD REACH INTO THE DUSK TO GIVE A SOUL TO ANY CREATURE ON THIS JOURNEY? WHAT REASONS DOES HE HAVE TO MAKE THIS MYSTERIOUS GIFT?

“If God’s gift is mysterious, Adam, maybe it’s impossible to know and futile to fret. Maybe we should forget the whole stupid notion of souls, immortal or otherwise.”

DOES IGNORING SUCH HARD QUESTIONS SEEM TO YOU, MISTER PAUL, AN ADMIRABLE WAY TO LIVE?

“If they’re nonquestions. If they don’t have any answers.”

Adam considered my reply. FOR ME, THEY ARE REAL QUESTIONS. He advanced the sheet of paper and added at the bottom of the page: LET US PRAY.

RuthClaire, present throughout this verbal and typed exchange, took from her handbag a slick little paperback, The Way of a Pilgrim, reputedly by an anonymous nineteenth-century Russian peasant, and read aloud from its opening page:

“‘On the twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost I went to church to say my prayers there during the Liturgy. The first Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians was being read, and among other words I heard these—“Pray without ceasing.” It was this text more than any other, which forced itself upon my mind, and I began to think how it was possible to pray without ceasing, since a man has to concern himself with other things also in order to make a living.’”

Soon RuthClaire was leading us in chanting the pilgrim’s habitual prayer, the Prayer of Jesus, which goes, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.” Throughout this chanting, though, I could think of nothing but how well Livia George was getting along at the West Bank without me.

Damn her, anyway.

At the Montaraz house, I earned my keep preparing all the meals that we did not take at the hospital or at off-campus eateries. Keeping my hand in, I called this culinary activity. T. P. ate with us on most of these cozy occasions, growing fonder of me with each bite. He no longer smarled at me, he unequivocally smiled. He especially liked a cheese-and-baby-shrimp omelet that I served up one morning for breakfast.

RuthClaire and I got along like brother and sister. Nights, I kept to the upstairs guest room with its bamboo-shoot wallpaper while she kept to the master bedroom just down the hall. T. P. awoke me in the morning by filching the bedcovers with a clever hand-over-hand motion that left the sheet and spread piled up on the floor like a drift of Dairy Queen ice cream. He wanted that gourmet omelet, and I was just the man to rustle it up. Less a godfather than an indulgent uncle, I happily obliged him.

Sister and brother, RuthClaire and I. My stay in the Montaraz house finally reconciled me to our divorce. In the bathroom, too many conjugal clues to overlook: a common toothpaste tube (neatly rolled up from the bottom), His & Her electric razors, a jar of antiperspirant that they no doubt shared. We did not sleep together during my stay, RuthClaire and I, and the tension between us drained away. I was at ease in the Montaraz house, in total harmony with all its occupants. Or almost total harmony.

How do you develop a cordial relationship with a hefty bearded young man who wears a .38 pistol strapped to his right ankle and a Ruger .357 half hidden under a fold of his Chattanooga Choo Choo T-shirt? This was Bilker Moody, the laconic Vietnam vet and erstwhile automobile repossessor who served as the Montaraz family’s chief security guard. Unmarried and virtually relative-less, he had adopted RuthClaire, Adam, and T. P. as surely as they had adopted him. I had met Bilker back in February, but he had stayed obsessively out of sight during those three days, as if the announced brevity of my visit required from him this considerate disappearing act.

Now, I saw Bilker Moody every day. Although he reputedly had an apartment of his own somewhere, during the week he slept in a small bare room—at one time a walk-in pantry—between the kitchen and the garage. The Montarazes had agreed to this live-in arrangement because it obviated the need to hire guards in shifts, as I had done at Paradise Farm. Also, Bilker had insisted that his vested interest in his own quarters would make him more vigilant than a guard from off the premises.

True, he sometimes took catnaps, but his experience in Southeast Asia had taught him to leap up at the tread of a cockroach. Besides, his peculiar circadian rhythms made him keenest at night, when the threat of intrusion was greatest. He was no slouch during the day, either. He had the reflexes, instincts, and nerves of a champion jai-alai player, despite his formidable bulk. He had honed his skills not only in the jungles of Vietnam but also during daring daylight recoveries of automobiles whose buyers had failed to keep up their payments. The Montarazes could scarcely go wrong engaging a willing man of his size, character, and fearlessness.

Bilker Moody genuinely esteemed the folks under his care. T. P. was fond of him, too, and had a remorseless fascination for the big man’s full-face beard. Around the child, Bilker displayed the retiring gentleness of a silverback gorilla. Usually, though, he avoided any play activity for fear of letting his guard slip. Enemies of the Montarazes’ privacy were everywhere. During my stay in July, he intercepted and politely ran off any number of curiosity-seekers. That was his job, not babysitting.

Bilker had as little to do with me as possible. He refused to eat the meals I fixed for RuthClaire and T. P., but clearly did not believe I was trying to poison anyone. If he and I chanced to approach each other, he showily gave me room to get by, sometimes mumbling “Hey” and sometimes not. RuthClaire said this was a respectful posture that, as an enlisted man, Bilker had automatically assumed for officers—but all I could think as I eased past was that he was pulling the pin on, and preparing to toss, a fragmentation grenade. Didn’t he know that in the late 1950s (ca. Elvis Presley’s induction), I had spent two years of obligatory military service as an enlisted man?

“Is it my breath?” I asked RuthClaire. “Too much garlic in the blintzes?”

“He’s shy, that’s all. His duty here is his life.”

“Shy, huh? How long had you and Adam known him before he began spilling his war and repo-man stories?”

“He wanted a job, Paul. He had to talk to get it. He doesn’t dislike you. He just feels uneasy about you, knowing you came to bolster the guard.”

Late one evening, then, after cleaning up after another midnight supper, I went to Bilker’s pantry to air the question man-to-man. The door to the pantry was ajar, revealing one wall of naked studs and a section of ceiling composed entirely of ancient tongue-and-groove slats. Tentatively, I rapped.

“What?” demanded Bilker Moody.

Beyond the pantry’s raised threshold, he sat on his rollaway bed with his Ruger trained on my abdomen. Recognizing me, he laid the pistol down. Disdainfully.

“Thought we could talk a minute,” I said.

The pantry contained a plywood counter upon which sat a sophisticated array of surveillance equipment, a hotplate, a General Electric coffee maker, a computer, and a small wire rack of paperback computer manuals and soft-core pornographic novels. A huge commercial calendar hung over the bed. Its pinup photograph was not of a bare-breasted nymphet but of a customized car with mud flaps and Gatling-gun exhausts. The company responsible for the calendar made socket wrenches.

Bilker Moody shook some cartridges into his palm from a box. He inspected each bullet tip in turn.

“I’ve been impressed with your performance around here,” I told him, hoping to disarm him with praise. He looked me full in the face, his expression grim. “Do I rub you the wrong way, Mr. Moody?”

“Ain’t no right way to rub me. Don’t like to be rubbed.”

“I’m not here to put your job in jeopardy. I’m glad you’re here. I only came because Adam wanted me to.”

“Why?”

The question surprised me. “As a kindness to RuthClaire, I guess.”

“If Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd.”

That stopped me briefly. Then I said, “That’s what I tell myself when I’m feeling down: ‘Hey, Paul, if Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd.’ Cheers me right up.”

“Stay out of my way.”

“This time next week, I will have been gone three or four days.”

“I tell you that,” Bilker Moody said, unblinking, “’cause wherever I am, that’s where the heat’s gonna be. You come in, I go out. It’s for your own good.”

“That’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it?”

“You’re the joker got took for that joyride down in the Fork? The one got a cross burned on his lawn?”

“So you’re really expecting trouble?”

“I’m paid to expect it.”

“Then maybe I’d better leave you to your work.”

“’Night,” he said. “And on your way out—”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t let the doorknob ream you in the asshole.”

“Mr. Moody—”

“Call me Bilker.” His eyebrows lifted, maybe to suggest his vulgar parting shot had been intended companionably, maybe to stress the irony of inviting me to use his first name after firing that shot. He raised the Ruger and waved it at the door.

“Good night, Bilker. Really enjoyed our chat.”

The next morning, I told RuthClaire about this exchange, as nearly verbatim as I could make it. She said I’d made a skeptical convert of Bilker. The proof of his good opinion was that he never joked with incorrigible turds, only those who struck him as recyclable into relatively fragrant human beings. Thanks a lot, I said. But I settled for it. It was better than getting fragged in my sleep….

RuthClaire and Adam had a downstairs studio, once a living room and parlor. Previous occupants had knocked out the wall, though, and now you had elbow room galore down there. In this vast space were unused canvases, stretching frames, makeshift easels, and even a sheet of perforated beaverboard with pegs and braces for hanging art supplies and tools. Elsewhere, finished and half-finished paintings leaned against furniture, reposed in untidy stacks, or vied for attention on the only wall where the artists had thought enough of their work to display it as if in a gallery.

“No more plate paintings,” RuthClaire told me the night after my visit to Bilker. “I’m off in a new direction. Wanna see?”

Of course I did. RuthClaire led me to a stack of canvases near a table consisting of three sawhorses capped by a sheet of plywood. All the paintings were small, no larger than three feet by four, most only a foot or two on their longest sides. RuthClaire had painted them in drab washed-out acrylics. They weren’t quite abstract, but neither were they representational—an ambiguity they shared with Adam’s bigger, bolder canvases.

To me, in fact, RuthClaire’s new paintings looked like preliminaries for paintings she had not yet essayed in final form. That she considered them finished, and regarded them with undiluted enthusiasm, astonished me. I wondered what to say. M.-K. Kander’s photographs had at least given me the verbal ammunition of my outrage. Here, though, was little to comment on: murky beige or green backgrounds in which many anonymous shapes swam.

“Well?” Then, noting my hesitation, she said, “Come on. Your honest reaction, Paul—the only kind that’s worth a flip.”

“The honest reaction of a chef probably isn’t worth even that, Ruthie Cee.”

“Oh, come on. You’ve got good art sense.”

“Let me off the hook.”

“You don’t like them?”

“If I’d crayoned stuff like this in Mrs. Stanley’s fourth-grade class in Tocqueville, she’d have said I was wasting paper. That honest enough for you?”

As if I’d yanked an invisible bridle, my ex’s nostrils flared. But she recovered and asked me why Mrs. Stanley would have made such a harsh judgment.

“For muddying the colors.”

“The muddiness is deliberate, Paul.”

I said that, as a consequence, these paintings looked anemic, downright blah.

“That’s an unconsidered first impression.”

“I’ve been staring at them a good five minutes.”

“A gnat’s eyeblink. Maybe you should live with one a while. Pick out the one you hate the least—or hate the most, for that matter—and take it home with you.”

I sighed. RuthClaire’s pitiful acrylics belonged on a bonfire. Even Paleolithic cave art—the least rather than the most polished examples—outshone these hazy windows on my ex’s soul. In the nearly ten years I’d known her, I’d never seen her do less challenging or attractive work. It was hard to believe that living with one of these paintings would heighten my appreciation of it or any of the others.

She began to explain what she was up to: freeing the work of pretense. Bright colors had a primitive appeal that rarely engaged the intellect. She was after a subtler means of capturing her audience. Artists had to risk alienating their audience—not with violence, sacrilege, or pornography, but with the unfamiliar, the understated, and the ambiguous—in order to make their art new. Viewers with the patience and the openness to outwait their first negative reactions would see what she was trying to do.

“But what if the paintings are bad, kiddo—banal, lackluster, and ugly?”

“Then they’ll never enlighten you, no matter how long you hang around them. Eventually, your negative reactions will be vindicated.” Quickly, though, she hedged this point: “Or maybe you’re just color-blind or tone-deaf to the work’s real merit.”

“I know spoiled pork when I smell it. I don’t have to eat it to know it’s bad.”

“A gourmet chef is a gourmet chef is a glorified short-order cook. An artist is an artist is an artist.”

“That’s smug, RuthClaire, disgustingly smug.”

She kissed my cheek. “You’ve noticed how small they are?”

“A point in their favor.”

“Another way to free them from pretense,” she said. “Rothko liked big paintings because the viewer has to climb into them and participate physically in their energy and movement. Well, I want the viewer to climb into these canvases intellectually—not in the clinical way a Mondrian demands, but in the spiritual way a decision for faith requires.”

“You want the viewer to take the merit of these paintings on faith?”

“I call the series Souls, Paul.”

“And that, of course, explains everything.”

At this juncture, RuthClaire good-humoredly decided to end the argument. Never had we been so badly at odds on the subject of her art, and never had our disagreement on the subject had less effect on our good opinion of the other: weird.

“Let’s go see Adam,” she said.

That afternoon I left the hospital with T. P.—to give Adam and RuthClaire time together alone. Our destination was a recently remodeled restaurant called Everybody’s. It served beer, sandwiches, pizza, salads, and pasta in an airy, relaxed atmosphere perfectly suited to its mostly college-connected clientele.

I ordered beer and a bacon-cheeseburger, but a Coke and a cheeseburger for my temporary ward. T. P. sat in a kiddie chair with a booster seat, and we whiled away forty-five minutes eating and watching people. Traffic plied the hill on North Decatur Road, squirrels scampered across the dappled campus, and emerald-necked pigeons strutted the sidewalks. I felt loose and at ease, almost ready to drowse. Staring into my beer, I may have actually done so.

And then someone stood beside T. P. under Everybody’s angled skylights. I almost spilled my beer reacting to her presence.

Before I could stand up, though, she sat down on the chair opposite mine. “Hello, Mr. Loyd. I recognized you from newspaper photos. The baby’s being here didn’t hurt, though. That made me look twice. Otherwise, I’d have walked on by.”

“Another tribute to my personal magnetism.”

The woman gave me a look of amiable amusement. I figured her to be in her early thirties—almost out of the range of my interest. Thin-boned and tall, she escaped looking angular. Springy amber ringlets framed her face. She wore a gold-plated necklace that seemed to be made up of dozens of minuscule glittering hinges. She folded her arms on the table, and the amber down prickling them caught the evanescent dazzle of the tiny hinges at her throat.

“My name,” she said, “is Caroline Hanna.”

I tried to get a grip on the familiarity of her name.

“You’ve heard of me before. Once, at Brian Nollinger’s urging, you took some photographs of Adam. Brian showed these to me. And it was from me that he got the clue to research the island of Montaraz as Adam’s possible point of origin.”

“Nollinger,” I said numbly.

“You don’t like him, do you?”

“In my book, he’s a world-class jerk.”

“That’s not entirely fair,” Caroline Hanna said evenly.

“I’m sure it isn’t. But his kindness to you, or to his aged mother, doesn’t absolve him of the dirt he kicked on my ex-wife. It doesn’t clear him of abusing my hospitality in Beulah Fork. To three quarters of his acquaintances, the man may be nobility incarnate—but if he shows me only his pimply backside, Miss Hanna, that’s what I’m going to judge him by.” She regarded me as if I were a sick bear in Atlanta’s zoo. “I called you Miss Hanna, didn’t I? You’re probably Doctor Hanna.”

“Call me Caroline.”

“Paul.” I tapped my thumb against my chest. “Anyway, I’m sorry to say your pal Nollinger, back in February, even had the brass to ask RuthClaire and Adam for money. He needed funds for field work he wanted to do somewhere.”

“He’d come to apologize.”

“Well, he blew that. He started talking about some painterly ape in England.”

Caroline Hanna smiled wistfully. “That’s Brian, all right.”

“What can I do for you? Would you like a beer?”

She declined, saying she’d only wanted a closer look at T. P.—the sweetie—and to introduce herself to the man who’d tied Brian into the biggest event in evolutionary science since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. She was glad to have contributed in a small way to the unraveling of the mystery of the origins of the Montaraz habilines. And she felt an odd kinship with me, each with our peripheral importance to the affair. Of course (she hastened to add), she was further on the periphery than I, but she sympathized with the muddle of feelings that a person in my position must sometimes experience. Wasn’t she running a gauntlet of small but painful changes herself?

Ever the diplomat, I said, “Like what?”

She said, “I wasn’t fishing for a chance to list them, honest.”

“You don’t have to list anything. Just tell me the most painful of your changes. It might do you good.”

Caroline considered this. Then she said, “Brian left Emory in June. He resigned his post in the anthropology department and left—without telling me anything. No foul play. He told the folks in his department. He just didn’t divulge his plans to me.”

“Another teaching or research position somewhere?”

“Not according to his department head. Brian said he was going to take off for a year and go overseas.”

“Maybe to visit Alistair Patrick Blair in Zarakal.” Caroline smiled wanly. I added, “Self-possessed women frighten him. The lack of a goodbye is the damning proof. He’s what my mother would have called a cad.”

“She would’ve had every right, but I’m not your mother.”

I lifted my beer mug to Caroline. “Amen to that.” I set the mug down. “But what else? Surely, getting shut of the biggest No-Dōz pusher at that primate field station can’t top the list of your woes.”

“You know you’re out of line, don’t you?”

“Sorry. I can’t help my feelings about, uh, Brian. Tell me something that’ll stir my sympathy for him.”

She started to rise. “Forgive me. I’ve got work to do.”

I caught her wrist. “One more chance. One more item from your list of worries. And I won’t be such a sarcastic bastard again, believe me.”

“No, you won’t,” Caroline said, subsiding. “How about this? The situation among the Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Penitentiary has me down. Some of those people belong in prison. Others deserve their freedom, and all my efforts to bring about releases have gone for naught. There. Do you like that one?”

“I’m in sympathy with it.”

“Stupid idealist.” She smiled gently. “I’m going.”

“Don’t you want to know what I’m doing here… with T. P.?”

“T. P.’s the baby? No. No, I don’t. It’s none of my business, and my business isn’t really any of yours, either.” Again she made as if to stand.

“Give me your address so we can redefine the limits of each other’s business.”

Hastily, she scribbled on the edge of a napkin. “Here’s a telephone number. Now I’ve got to go, really.”

T. P. reacted to her move—throughout our talk, he’d stared at her with moony adoration—by reaching out and upsetting his drink. I gathered napkins with which to blot the mess. In order to get at it, I lifted T. P.’s chair out of the way.

“Do you need some help?” Caroline asked.

“No, I’ve got it. Look, though. The little bugger’s stuck on you, lady. So am I.”

“Hush. That’s embarrassing.” She spoke in an undertone and looked around Everybody’s at everybody looking at us.

“Knocking over his cup? Nah. Happens all the time with kids. Not embarrassing. People make allowances.”

“I’m not talking about that, and you know it.” She retreated a step or two. “I won’t mind if you call, though—not at all.” Before I could reply, she’d gone.

A young man with bushy hair and a long apron helped me finish cleaning up, and I sat back down. During her fifteen- or twenty-minute stint at our table, Caroline Hanna had affected me in the powerful, nonrational way teenagers sometimes collide with each other. A pulse in my throat was working, and a film of sweat on my palms endangered my grip on my beer mug. How ungrown-up. How immature. In a few years I would be fifty, and here I was actively encouraging the kind of hormonal rush that sends callow high-school aspirants to ecstasy screaming to the showers. Nobody since RuthClaire had made me feel that way, not even Molly Kingsbury.

Later, our bill duly paid, T. P. and I returned to the hospital.

Back in Adam’s recovery room, RuthClaire told me that David Blau had invited us to go with him and his wife Evelyn to a nightclub near the Georgia Tech campus. The club—Sinusoid Disturbances—was on a narrow alley perpendicular to Spring Street. Its main attraction was live music, but it also featured (although only on Fire Sine Fridays) the work of avant-garde “performance artists.” These artists used music, projected visual images, props, the spoken word, and a lot of strange choreographies to make statements about art and life. David ranked high among the performance artists who had given Sinusoid Disturbances its reputation as Atlanta’s leader on the New Wave nightclub scene. His group, consisting entirely of people from Abraxas, would headline at tonight’s Fire Sine Friday. And so Blau wanted RuthClaire and me to attend.

“What about Adam?” I asked.

The habiline typed: I BE FINE. TOMORROW, I AM UNWRAPPED. ME FOR REST AND READING.

“May I bring a date?”

This request startled RuthClaire. “A date?”

“That’s right. A woman.”

“I never assumed you meant a two-legged raisin. I just didn’t know you knew anybody up here to ask.”

“I’ve been shinnying down a knotted sheet every night at your house, Ruthie Cee. Meet a lot of folks that way.”

“It’s amazing Bilker hasn’t shot you. What’s her name?”

“Caroline Hanna.”

As I had done, RuthClaire struggled to locate this name in her mental ledger of friends and acquaintances. I let her struggle. In fact, I left Adam’s room in search of a telephone, found the number of the sociology department, dialed it, and asked to be put through to Dr. Hanna’s office. Although startled to hear from me so soon, she accepted my invitation, offering to meet me at the Montaraz house at seven-thirty, if that would simplify our rendezvous. Right now, though, no time for chitchat—she’d promised the students in her next class she’d have a test graded for them today.

RuthClaire and I left the hospital at five-thirty, T. P. dead to the world in my lap. On Hurt Street, Bilker emerged from the garage like a troll forsaking the shadow of its footbridge to terrorize a wayfarer. Hands on hips, he bulked in the sunlight, malevolently squinting.

“We’re going out on the town, Bilker,” RuthClaire said. “Set the security alarms, lock everything up, and don’t sweat the traffic around here. I’ll ask the Fulton County police to make extra tours of the neighborhood. I need an escort, Bilker. Mr. Loyd, my ex, already has a date.”

Even in the garage, Bilker squinted. “To where, ma’am?”

“Sinusoid Disturbances. Wear some struttin’ duds, okay?”

“For a trip to the doctor. Whose sinus trouble is it, anyway, yours or—” He jerked a thumb at me, unable to speak my name aloud.

“Informal clothes, Bilker. Don’t worry about a thing tonight. Tonight’s for fun.”

The Blaus arrived at a quarter past seven. David had dressed like a painter, not the beret-and-palette, but the extension-ladder-and-gallon-bucket, kind. His wife, Evelyn, although at least forty, wore a little girl’s party gown and patent-leather shoes with buckles. The Blaus liked costumes, obviously.

Caroline Hanna, as good as her word, pulled up in front of the house at seven-thirty, in a blue Volkswagen Beetle. I helped her out, and the small boy in me responded approvingly to her neat, fairly conservative clothes. Her skirt, a beige wraparound belted with a chain similar to the hinged necklace still at her throat. Her jersey had stylized chevrons on its three-quarter-length sleeves, giving her the look of a drill sergeant in the Scandinavian Fashion Force. I walked her to the porch to meet the others.

T. P., who was going with us, was natty in white shorts and a T-shirt with a polka-dot bow tie printed on the material. He reached for Caroline. She took him from Bilker and jogged him in her arms. Bilker looked relieved. After a bit more small talk, we split up for the drive to Sinusoid Disturbances, the Blaus taking their car and Bilker assuming my Mercedes’s wheel to chauffeur the rest of us.

The sidewalk in front of Sinusoid Disturbances angled by at a daunting grade. As we drove past looking for a parking spot, I wondered if the bistro’s patrons had to walk around inside the club like sheep on a hillside, struggling not to topple. No one would ever mistake the crumbling, two-story building for Caesar’s Palace.

“Uh, what kind of crowd do they get here?” Caroline asked.

“A pretty weird mix, David says,” RuthClaire replied, her arms on the seat back. “Tech students, punk rockers, Atlanta College of Art attendees. It’s mostly the last group that gets off on Fire Sine Fridays. Some of the punks’ll go along with it, too, but the Tech students—the men, anyway—have a tendency to disrupt things.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Oh, it’s not so terrible. David sees the disruptions as part of the spectacle.”

Bilker, stymied in his efforts to find a parking space, let us all out in front of the nightclub. A boy with an oversized safety pin through his cheek opened the front door for Caroline, who was carrying T. P. for RuthClaire. This door was a slab of stained oak with a window of amber glass featuring a sine-curve pattern etched into it in spooky crimson. I thanked the boy for his courtesy, and he replied, almost as if he were human, “You’re welcome.” Then the door shut behind us, and darkness settled upon our gingerly stepping group like a coffin lid. Criminy, I thought.

But RuthClaire, who had my arm, directed Caroline and me to a teller’s cage from which a reddish glow emanated. We were in a foyer of some kind, and at the cage I bought four admissions from a woman in cutoff jeans and a short-sleeved sweatshirt—after the punk at the door, a paragon of Middle American normality.

A few more steps put us on a concrete landing just beyond the foyer. Concrete steps descended from the landing to the floor, twelve feet down, or you could squeeze along the outside wall of the ticket cage to a mezzanine that projected from the bistro wall paralleling the interstate highway outside. Chairs and circular tables crowded both the mezzanine and the main floor below, and almost all of this furniture had the look of radioactive wrought iron.

Higher than the mezzanine level on the club’s uphill side was a control booth for Sinusoid Disturbances’s lead disc jockey. It had champagne-tinted Plexiglas windows, and a big, acorn-shaped flasher that whipped strobes of blue and white light around the interior. Loud music played, and below us, flailing away in the noise storm, jitterbugged a host of damned-looking human wraiths. T. P. was as awe-stricken, or as horrified, as I. He clung to Caroline as if she might toss him over the rail into the cobalt chaos of the pit. RuthClaire pointed out a table on the club’s far side, next to the projecting runway of the stage on which live entertainers would perform, and said David had reserved it for us.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Backstage with Evelyn. They’re setting up. It’s probably going to be another thirty or so minutes before they come on.”

A trio of dubious humanoids brushed past us on the way downstairs. One of them bumped me in the back. Her hairdo was by the très chic team of Friar Tuck and Bozo the Clown, but she hurriedly swung about to apologize. “It’s okay,” I said, startled by the depth of her anxiousness. “That kidney never worked very well, anyway.”

“Oh, no! I really did hurt you!”

I assured her that I was fine, that my allusion to a disabled kidney had been meant as a joke. But even in retreat the girl apologized, and soon Caroline and RuthClaire were laughing. “What the hell was that all about?” I asked them.

“Really, it’s not about anything,” RuthClaire said. “David says this is the only part of the country where kids who go punk forget to stop saying please and thank you. It’s a cultural thing. Atlanta’s punks are polite.”

“All of them?”

“A lot of them. That one seemed to want to make up for those who aren’t.”

Caroline shifted T. P. from one hip to the other. He waved a fist in time to the music, his head ticktocking—the sort of repetitive actions that wear out a person holding a child. RuthClaire noticed and took T. P. from Caroline, and we waited on the landing until Bilker swaggered up behind us. His gait seemed designed to intimidate anyone who took exception to his string tie or his undisguised contempt for Sinusoid Disturbances. Under his tan jacket (whose maroon back vents occasionally opened out like the gills of a gasping bass), he wore, I knew, his Ruger.

On duty. Ready for action. Anticipating the heat.

A little melodramatic, I thought again. Bilker clearly envisioned himself a latter-day Rooster Cogburn charging in single-handedly to rout the bad guys.

Once on the main floor, I saw that some of the club’s patrons were not flamboyant punks but intelligent young men and women of student age. I was probably the oldest person on the premises. I felt a tad more comfortable here, among the kids wearing neat and modish clothes, but I was still a relic among these bionic space babies. Then the music stopped, and Bilker allowed that the only thing any noisier he had ever heard was a dusk-to-dawn mortar attack on his barracks near Da Nang. He was a country-music fan, a devotee of the no-nonsense article spun out by Roy Acuff and George Jones. Groups like the Oak Ridge Boys and Alabama soured his stomach. The former did too many cutesy-poo songs, and the latter, God save their souls, he’d once seen at a country music festival wearing short pants—short pants, for pity’s sake. That was okay on a cookout, mebbe, but not on grown men making their living in front of the public.

I’d never heard Bilker do so much talking. Through his tirade, I held Caroline’s hand, pinning it to my knee under the tabletop. Then the club’s DJ spoke, and the sound system permitted his words to reverberate over our heads like an articulate siren:

“Welcome to another Fire Sine Friday at Sinusoid Disturbances, culture freaks! Comin’ atcha from his plastic cloud is Hotlanta’s answer to that silver-tongued sweetie in the White House, Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman! Ol’ Bitsy’s here to ease the strain ’twixt donkeys and heffalumps, honkies and cooler cats, menfolks and ladies fair, hetero and homo pairs, an’—Lawd have mercy, y’all!—’twixt your ever-lovin’ bodies and your ever-livin’ SOOOOOUULS!” This last word stretched out until it had five or six syllables and the pitch of a freight-train whistle.

The curtains on stage parted, and the Moog-warped melody of an old standard set to a fusion-rock beat surged back and forth through the bistro. Seven well-endowed young women in body stockings pranced into view, tossing their heads, rotating their arms, and trying very hard to unsocket their pelvises.

“Prepare yourselves, culture freaks,” cried Bitsy Vardeman from aloft, “for a little heartstoppin’ boola-boola from Ess Dee’s very own sultry and sensual ballet corps, the Impermanent Wave Dancers!” The Impermanent Wave Dancers did twenty minutes of gymnastic splits, leaps, and buttock-flinching to louder and louder rock music. Bilker watched with the same clinical aloofness with which a police officer might watch a fight between pit bulls. T. P. clapped his hands. Caroline’s attitude was harder to gauge: a distrustful kind of wonder, maybe.

RuthClaire shouted, “David hates this, but it always gets a Friday-night crowd to pay a three-dollar cover for an evening of performance art!”

Finally, after a raucous eternity, the dancers departed, and Bipartisan Bitsy Vardeman announced, “Okay, babies, here tonight from Abraxas, Atlanta’s Hall of Miracles and Mirages, David Blau and the Blau Blau Rebellion! Give ’em a hand, culture freaks! I say now, Give ’em a hand!” Applause was sparse, and the darkness that had fallen after the dancers’ exit persisted. Some students near us began to grumble.

Eventually, though, David Blau’s voice spoke from behind the sequined curtain: “Let there be light!” Obligingly, Vardeman spotlighted the curtain, which parted to reveal a huge black tarp suspended like a movie screen at the stage’s rear. Blau, in his house painter’s costume, walked forward from the back, stopped on the edge of the projecting runway, and stared soulfully out over the heads of his audience.

“And Adam knew Eve,” he declared in actorish tones. “And knew her, and knew her, and knew her. And so the generations of Adam evolved. They evolved, my friends, toward the many likenesses of God you see sitting at tables all around you.”

An unexpected blackout.

In this darkness, everyone in Sinusoid Disturbances could hear some hurried but efficient-sounding rolling noises. Then the footlights came on, and we could see a group of two-dimensional cardboard figures on wheels lined up in front of the tarp. Each cutout depicted a different representative of five early hominid species. The figures to the left looked noticeably more apelike than those to the right—although, anomalously, the figure in the middle had the most brutish physique. The oddest thing about the cutouts was that through holes corresponding to the figures’ mouths, there hung limp blue balloons. Suddenly, all five balloons inflated, obscuring the painted faces behind them, and each balloon jiggled against the head of its cutout as if yearning to escape skyward. Because of the frank frontal nudity of the five hominids, this was an especially ludicrous sight, and many of the kids around us sniggered.

A man of Oriental descent stepped out from behind the figure on the far left. “Australopithecus afarensis,” he said. As soon as he had spoken, he reached behind his cutout, and the balloon hiding its face floated straight up, four feet or so, and bobbed to a standstill on its string.

Pam Sorrells’s head appeared above that of the second figure in the line. “Australopithecus africanus,” she said. Its balloon also climbed ceilingward, halting about a foot above the balloon of the A. afarensis cutout.

Then David Blau peeked mischievously from behind the third figure. “Australopithecus robustus,” he said. The balloon attached to this cutout—the most massively built of the five—ascended barely over a foot. The incongruity of the balloon’s brief ascent, after the audience had been led to expect something else, provoked laughter—as did the creature’s resemblance to a squat, semi-naked gorilla.

Evelyn Blau popped up behind the fourth figure. This one bore an uncanny and obviously deliberate likeness to RuthClaire’s Adam. Said Evelyn distinctly, “Homo habilis.” The helium-filled balloon in front of this cutout’s face rose to a height of six or seven feet.

A black man in painter’s coveralls—a young artist with a studio at Abraxas—stepped from behind the final cutout. He said, “Homo erectus.” The balloon belonging to this creature, the tallest and most human-looking of the lot, floated upward a foot higher than the habiline’s, and the black man strolled to the stage’s apron, looked out, spread his arms, and haughtily said, “Homo sapiens sapiens.” Man the wise the wise: the culmination of God’s evolutionary game plan.

From the pocket of his coveralls, this man took a pellet pistol, an act that prompted Bilker Moody to reach for the shoulder harness under his coat, but RuthClaire patted his wrist and shook her head. Meanwhile, the performance artist with the pellet gun turned toward the cutouts, aimed his weapon, and, squeezing off a shot, popped the balloon belonging to A. afarensis. The cutout’s human attendant rolled it off-stage. Then the nonchalant black man popped the balloons of the remaining hominid cutouts, giving the person behind each figure just enough time to push it into the wings before firing at the next balloon. When he finished, he pocketed his weapon, walked to the Homo erectus cutout, and, like a hotdog vendor pushing a cart in Manhattan, guided the last of the extinct hominids into the wings.

Blackout.

A bewildered silence gripped everyone in Sinusoid Disturbances. Someone—a football player from Tech?—shouted, “What the fuckin’ hell was that supposed to mean?” Others at their tables began to boo, a din that swept tidally from one end of the club to the other. Some of the art students near us, though, were on their feet applauding and shouting, “Bravo! Bravo!”

Bitsy Vardeman averted a donnybrook by spinning Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family,” a hit even before Adam’s appearance at Paradise Farm. Many in the audience clapped their hands, sang along, and boogied around their tables.

The lights in the club came up full, and all five members of the Blau Blau Rebellion were revealed on stage, each one clutching a bouquet of ten or fifteen lighter-than-air balloons. David, Evelyn, and their fellows handed the balloons to various people in the crowd, beckoning folks toward the stage or ambling out the runway to make the transfer. T. P. stood up in RuthClaire’s lap, his arm stretched out for a balloon. Pam Sorrells, I saw, was coming down the runway toward us, Sister Sledge continuing to chant the lyrics of their repetitive anthem and dozens upon dozens of people now surging forward to intercept Pam.

“Remember,” she cried over the music, “don’t take one unless you believe—”

“Believe what?” a male student shouted.

“Unless you believe you’re immortal! And if you take one, don’t let it pop!”

“Why the hell not?” shouted the same young man, who had cleared a path to the end of the runway.

Pam replied, “Because if you let it pop, you’ll die.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“This is your soul. If you let it pop, you’ll die within three days.”

“Bullshit!”

David Blau came to the end of the runway, lifted his cluster of balloons, and told the entire bistro, “It isn’t bullshit. Whoever accepts one of these, but fails to care for it and lets it pop, well, you’ll blow away on the wind as if you never existed.”

The theatricality of this speech did not deprive it of effect—just the opposite. It clearly frightened some of those who had come forward for balloons. David had uttered a formula, and that formula produced the desired result: an explosion of superstitious doubt in people who ordinarily took pride in their hardnosed pragmatism. Even I found myself believing David’s weird formula. Some folks backed away, others shoved forward to replace the faint-hearted. T. P. had no doubt. He wanted a balloon.

“Hunh,” he said, almost toppling from RuthClaire’s arms. “Hunh, hunh, hunh!”

“Go get him one,” Caroline Hanna urged me.

Pam Sorrells had just about given out all her balloons, while the black man who had shot out the bobbing souls of the cardboard hominids was distributing his dwindling supply on the runway’s opposite side.

“That’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “Bilker’ll get him a balloon.”

“No, ma’am. I got other work.”

“I’ll do it, then,” Caroline said.

“You’ll get an elbow in the lip,” I warned her.

Almost miraculously, a punkette with a cottony white scalp lock and no eyebrows appeared at our table. A frail creature in a vest lacing across her midriff, she extended her arms to T. P., who went to her as if she were an old and trusted friend. RuthClaire gave the kid to the newcomer as much to relieve the pressure on her arms as to humor T. P. “I’ll get him a b’loon,” the girl growled, screwing up one eye to look at my godson at such close range. “Friend a mine round there’s got one awready. He don’ want it. I’ll give it to your nipper. Be rat back.” She sounded as if she had a mouthful of cornmeal. Half stupefied by surprise, half grateful to her for calming the baby, we watched as she backed away to fetch the “b’loon” from her friend. She scarcely seemed to move her feet.

Then Bilker awoke: “Hey, wait a minute!”

“I think it’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “She seemed familiar. She’ll get Paulie a balloon and bring him back in a better temper.”

“I’d better go after her,” Bilker said.

Something in me was belatedly alerted to the situation’s queerness. “Look, Bilker, you stay with RuthClaire and Caroline. I’ll go after her.”

“What’s the matter?” Caroline grabbed my arm. Patrons near the end of the runway engulfed the white-haired girl, and the balloons floating above the crowd were no more useful as markers than clouds.

“I think I know her,” I said, shaking free. “That’s what’s wrong.” I plunged past Bilker, rebounded off a Tech student heading for the stage, squirmed through a gap, and, my heart pounding mightily, sidled around the end of the runway. Spotlights continued to rake the club’s interior, and behind me RuthClaire cried in anguish, “Paulie!”

Beyond the runway, I broke into an open area, but T. P. and his abductress had already vanished. They might have taken any of four or five different routes, but I headed for the nearest exit, a heavy door to the far left of the stage. I slammed its push bar, opening it on the intimidating whirr and rumble of the expressway. An automobile was heading down the hill past the front of the club, but it was hard to believe the punkette had trotted through the alley and climbed into that vehicle so quickly. I ducked back inside Sinusoid Disturbances, and the door wheezed shut on its pneumatic retards.

Bilker was at my side. “She got away?”

My helpless look said all he needed to know.

“Shit!” he said. “It’s a kidnapping, a goddamn kidnapping.”

“Maybe not. This place is crazy. She could turn up again in a couple of minutes.”

“Yeah,” said Bilker. “And the Rooskies could unilaterally disarm tomorrow.” His hand inside his coat, he scanned the crowd for one face in a shifting mosaic of faces. “Friggin’ donkey brain.”

“If I’m a donkey brain, you’re its butt. You let RuthClaire hand the kid over.”

Bilker looked at me with malevolent contempt. “Who said I was talkin’ about you?” Someone had kidnapped Tiny Paul, and we were at loggerheads over a matter of no consequence. Even Bilker understood that. He grabbed my arm and dragged me back to the table where RuthClaire and Caroline were waiting. T. P. might be lost (for the time being, if not for good), but he had no intention of compounding his failure by letting someone else abduct RuthClaire.

“What happened? What’s going on?” The women spoke almost in unison. Bilker mumbled something about our having lost the girl’s trail, and RuthClaire, glancing back and forth between her bodyguard and me, clutched my lapels.

“You know who it was, don’t you?”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” I said, “but I think it was Nancy, with her eyebrows plucked and her head partly shaved. You know, little Nancy Teavers, Elvis’s wife.”

Bilker spent the next thirty minutes charging through the crowd at Sinusoid Disturbances, buttonholing people to ask if they’d seen a skinny female carrying a kid in white shorts. He barged into the restrooms—the women’s as well as the men’s—to identify the startled occupants of the toilet stalls. His efforts were unavailing, but he kept trying, as if single-minded persistence would make T. P. reappear.

I telephoned the police, who sent a squad car and notified the offices of several other area law-enforcement units. The cops who came interviewed RuthClaire, Caroline, and me while Bilker continued to play detective on his own. The older of the two policemen did all the questioning. His nametag said Crawford. He was a stocky man with a forehead furrowed by years of occupational squinting and skepticism. So he could hear our answers, he questioned us on the sidewalk out front. His partner, meanwhile, descended into the pandemonium of Sinusoid Disturbances to look under the rocks that Bilker had not already turned over.

Aboveground, Crawford pursued his interrogation: “She was a waitress in your restaurant in Beulah Fork?”

“Once upon a time.”

“Why would she kidnap the Montaraz child, Mr. Loyd?”

I told Sergeant Crawford about the Ku Klux Klan involvement of Nancy’s late husband, E. L. Teavers. I told him how Adam had wrestled E. L. into the vat of an abandoned brick kiln in Hothlepoya County. That was all it took. Crawford recalled the story. Every city cop and backwoods deputy in Georgia knew it. He took a note.

“Revenge? You think her motive’s revenge?”

“I don’t think she planned this herself,” I said. “At the West Bank, she was a sweet, hardworking kid. She liked me. She liked RuthClaire. Somone’s gotten to her.”

“Who?”

“Craig Puddicombe, to put a name on him.”

“Oh, God.” RuthClaire slumped into me. “I handed Paulie over to her. I put him into her arms.” She began to cry.

“On some level,” I said, “you recognized Nancy. She took T. P. from you, you didn’t foist him on her.”

“I might as well have wrapped him up in a box and mailed him to her doorstep.”

“Look, you’d been entertaining T. P. all evening. The subliminal-recognition factor made you trust the girl in spite of her getup. You befriended her after E. L.’s death, you certainly didn’t expect her to betray that friendship.”

“I wasn’t thinking about any of that!” RuthClaire cried in frustration.

“That’s my point. It all worked on you subconsciously. Stop blaming yourself for somebody else’s villainy.”

Crawford tapped his pen on his notepad. “Puddicombe vanished after that brick-kiln business. His picture’s in every post office in the Southeast, but nobody’s seen him since.”

“Nancy Teavers has.”

“What makes you so sure?” Crawford eyed me from under his furrows. “For all we know, Mr. Loyd, the kid could be living in Acapulco.”

“For all we know, he could be sitting down there in Sinusoid Disturbances with a Mohawk haircut and a safety pin through his cheek. Nancy would have never planned something like this by herself. But Craig may’ve convinced her that this is how to pay back Adam and RuthClaire for E. L.’s death—even if he did bring it upon himself.”

“Adam has to be told,” RuthClaire said. “He has to know.”

Curious patrons, wraiths from the pit, had gathered around us to gawk and eavesdrop. At last, though, David and Evelyn Blau came out to us through these bizarre figures—with Bilker Moody and Crawford’s young partner right behind them. Mireles, the second cop, approached Crawford. “The ticket seller says the kidnapper—the female punk you described—began showing up for Fire Sine Fridays in June.”

“Alone?” said Crawford.

“She isn’t sure. It’s dark in there. The girl always paid her cover and went on in.”

“She just came on Fridays?”

“The ticket seller only works three nights a week, which helps pin it down. She remembers her coming especially for Fire Sine Fridays.” Mireles flipped open a notepad of his own. “The only time the suspect ever spoke, the ticket seller says, she asked if… uh, the Blau Blau Rebellion was doing a gig.”

“A gig?” said David Blau distastefully.

“When she found out they weren’t,” Mireles added, “she didn’t bother to pay the cover. She left.”

“A fan,” Evelyn Blau said. “There’s loyalty for you.”

“And she came alone?” Crawford pressed.

Mireles had a thin, sallow face with eyes as brown as Hershey kisses. “It’s like I said, Sergeant, she was careful to appear to be alone.”

Bilker said, “I found a guy who’d seen her with somebody.”

Sirens wailed. Traffic on the nearby expressway and the bass notes thrumming through the nightclub made the whole hill quiver like a drum skin.

“One of the yahoos who kep’ yellin’ during y’all’s show,” Bilker said. “He got concerned when I told him what happened to Paulie. He said the freak that took him would sometimes sit at a table with a bearded fella.”

“More,” Crawford demanded.

“He tried to play it cool-punk, like—but he couldn’t quite get it on, the look and all—cowboy boots ’n’ jeans instead of tennis shoes and pleated baggies. Like a guy with an eight-to-five job whose boss would can him if he ever showed up lookin’ freaky.”

“Craig Puddicombe,” I said.

“I’ve got to go see Adam.” RuthClaire dug her fingernails into my wrist.

“Somebody needs to go back to your house,” Crawford said. “There may be a telephone call. That’s almost always the next step, the telephone call.”

“Not if the motive’s revenge,” RuthClaire said. “They may just kill him.”

“Not too likely,” Crawford said. He explained that a kidnapping usually pointed to a less gruesome motive, like extorting a ransom. If Paulie’s abductors had merely wanted to kill him to punish his parents, they could have shot him from ambush. They could have run him and his guardian down with a car. They could have set off a bomb on the porch. Instead, they’d staged a crime requiring some knowledge of the kid’s mother’s movements, some fairly elaborate disguises and subterfuge, lots of patience, and an entire bistro basement full of luck. Tonight, everything, including Adam’s confinement in the Emory hospital, had come together for them. It was even possible that the accidental conjunction of all these elements had provided the couple an irresistible opportunity to act on impulse. Now, though, they’d try to cash in. Crawford staked his reputation on the inevitability of a telephone call demanding money and outlining a sequence of steps for delivering the ransom.

Caroline, who had held RuthClaire’s arm throughout this spiel, spoke up: “You’re not being clear, Sergeant. Do you think the kidnappers planned the whole thing in excruciating detail, or just got lucky and took the main chance? It seems to me that their initial motive might tip their ultimate behavior.”

“I’m not being clear, miss, because I’m not a mind reader. Maybe they planned everything in ‘excruciating detail’ for some other night, but got lucky this evening and jumped the gun. Same difference, as I see it. They’re gonna ask for money.”

There was more discussion. Bored now, the hangers-on on the sidewalk began to drift away. Vehicles eased along Spring Street and our own little alley in deference to the squad car at curbside. The night smelled of engine oil and abused asphalt. Neon streaked the floodlit edges of the sky.

The Blaus agreed to take RuthClaire home. Bilker would ride with them. Caroline and I would go to Emory Hospital to break the news of T. P.’s abduction to his father. The police would send detectives to the Montaraz house, both to protect its occupants and to monitor the kidnappers’ unfolding extortion strategy. If twenty-four hours went by with no break in the case, the FBI would soon play the most prominent role. Meanwhile, Crawford and Mireles would keep following up leads here at the nightclub. Elsewhere in Fulton County—as in DeKalb, Cobb, Clayton, and Gwinnett—sheriff’s patrols and municipal police forces would set up interlocking dragnets. Interlocking dragnets. That sounded good, but I reminded myself that no one knew what kind of vehicle Craig and Nancy had at their disposal. Surely, Puddicombe had not been able to keep E. L.’s pickup truck for the past year without incurring arrest. On the other hand, maybe he had changed its tag, jacked up its body, pin-striped its hood. I gave Crawford a description of the truck as I remembered it—a brief already on file with the GBI—and he in turn had it radioed around the greater metropolitan area. (Any white-haired young woman gunning through Avondale Estates in a Ram Charger would provoke immediate suspicion.)

Bilker told me where he’d parked my car. When I got the directions straight, Caroline and I told the others good night and walked arm in arm down the sidewalk and through an alley to a crumbling asphalt terrace. A smelly Dempsey Dumpster occupied most of this space. Bilker had left the Mercedes beside the dumpster with two wheels on the terrace and two on the alley’s broken cobbles. No one else had even considered contesting the spot. Ignoring the effluvia from the trash bin, I pulled Caroline to me and kissed her full on the lips. She broke away.

“Men have all the innate romance of doorstops.”

RuthClaire had said something like that to me back in December. I wrinkled my nose and looked around. “Not exactly the Moulin Rouge, is it?”

“Paul, please don’t fantasize a friendly fuck later tonight. I’m not ready for it. Even if I had been, this kidnapping would’ve changed that.”

A friendly fuck, I thought. Now there’s an expression RuthClaire would have never used. But hearing it spoken had an effect the reverse of what Caroline intended—it excited me. Maybe I was a bleary-eyed lecher for whom dirty talk is an aphrodisiac. Dirty? A single four-letter word of hearty Anglo-Saxon origin? Maybe, instead, I was a macho bigot who believed “bad language” was the province of males only. Me, macho? A bigot, maybe—but not a muscle-flexer. More than likely, I was simply unused to hearing “bad language” on a woman’s lips. The cultural upheaval of the past two decades had passed me by. I was a forty-seven-year-old southern gentleman only now getting straight the distinction in nuance between shacking up and living together.

“Look,” Caroline said, “my car is still in front of the Montarazes’. Tomorrow when you and RuthClaire visit Adam, one of you can drive my VW and leave it near the sociology building.” She handed me her keys. “I would like to see you again. It’s just that this isn’t the time, Paul. I can’t believe you think it is.”

“Life’s short, Miss Hanna. This proves it.”

“Ah, another disciple of the carpe diem approach.” Her voice took on a brittle edge: “You think they’ll kill him?”

“They may.” My knuckles whitened as I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. “Puddicombe may, at least. It’s hard for me to believe Nancy’d go along with him on that score. I don’t know what he did to entice her up here, to get her to go punk—but they do share a common pain.”

“The fact that Teavers died.”

“Right. Her husband. His friend. I thought Nancy was free of that taint, though. I thought she’d managed to work through it all unscathed.”

What Caroline answered struck me as a sorrowful rebuke: “People who work through everything unscathed are rare. There may be nobody like that at all, only good pretenders.”

“Maybe so.”

“Could we trust an unscathed person, Paul? He—or she—wouldn’t be human.”

I looked at her sidelong. “The trouble is, you can’t trust a scathed person, either. You can’t trust anybody.”

“No,” Caroline murmured. “You can’t trust anybody.”

We rode for a time. Then I began to speculate on the kidnapping. Puddicombe had been hiding out for a year, eluding the police and plotting revenge. On the night of E. L.’s disappearance into the brick kiln, he had probably lit out for Alabama in his buddy’s truck. There, after ditching the vehicle, he had lain low, probably with the active aid of fellow Klan members. Maybe he had left the Southeast completely, striking out for the Rockies or the California coast. But if he had, he had almost certainly acquired another car. Teavers’s pickup would have been a red flag to every highway patrolman between Opelika and Amarillo. Or maybe he had simply disguised himself—by growing a beard, say—and ridden the bus.

Eventually, though, Puddicombe had returned from his fugitive exile, migrating as if magnetized to Georgia’s capital city. In Atlanta, after all, it would not have been hard for him to find work as a dishwasher or a garage mechanic. The biggest threat to his job would have lain in the likelihood of someone from Beulah Fork catching sight of him, but if his work had kept him, so to speak, backstage, that likelihood would have been a skimpy one. On the street, a beard and sunglasses would have preserved his cover. To trip himself up, he would have had to run a traffic light or neglect paying a bill. And so far, Puddicombe had avoided those kinds of trip wires.

“How would he have involved Nancy?” Caroline said.

Probably a letter, I told her. He would have written only once, and he would have stipulated a meeting somewhere between Atlanta and Beulah Fork. At a roadhouse or a small-town cafe, he would have pressed his case, playing on Nancy’s submerged bitterness and arguing the need to bring about E. L.’s posthumous vindication. Initially, she may have resisted these arguments, but at later rendezvous, each new meeting arranged at the one before, she would have begun to relish the idea of avenging her late husband—maybe not by killing anyone, but by bringing E. L. back to life as a worrisome force in the Montarazes’ undeserved paradise of love and success. Indeed, she and Craig may have fallen in love. Once, after all, E. L. and Craig had been as close as brothers, and somewhere in the Bible it was written that a man ought to wed his brother’s widow to protect her person and champion her causes.

“You know the Bible?” Caroline asked.

“Only by hearsay. The same way Puddicombe would know it. In Beulah Fork, distortions of it contaminate everyone’s thinking, mine included. We have a bountiful legacy of high-minded misquotation.”

“You think they’re lovers?”

“If not lovers, sweethearts. In this day and age, probably lovers.”

“Why so certain?”

“Nancy’s only eighteen. She was widowed at seventeen. Most of her school chums have moved from Beulah Fork, or married, or both. When she told me she was leaving the West Bank, she said it was to ‘seek her fortune.’ Male chauvinist pig that I am, I took that as a code word for husband. She was bored, lonely, and vulnerable. Why wouldn’t she fall in love with Craig?”

“Or he with her?”

“Right. Craig was E. L.’s twin in a lot of ways, and Nancy is a pretty little girl, or was, anyway. They’re both probably fighting to make sense of events and attitudes they haven’t handled all that well by themselves.”

“Nancy was doing all right, wasn’t she?”

“Until Craig contacted her again.”

“Do you think they’ve been following RuthClaire and Adam around, waiting for an opportunity like tonight’s?”

“Looks like it.”

“Then tonight had to be a dream-come-true for your… well, your Puddicombe Conspiracy. Everything fell into place. Nancy was able to walk off with Paulie as easily as a kid steals an apple from a produce bin. Doesn’t that strike you as—” she hunched her shoulders, shivering in recollection— “weird?”

“But everything didn’t fall into place. Bilker came along. You and I came along. They had to make some of their own luck, and they did that. Nancy’s costume, her choice of the balloon handout as the best time to approach us, their goddamn perfect getaway.” I took a quick glance at Caroline. “What are you trying to imply? That there’s something fishy about this business?”

“Paul, please don’t take this wrong—”

“God save me, take what wrong?”

“I don’t know RuthClaire. I don’t know Adam. For that matter, I really don’t know you. It crossed my mind—just briefly—that this might be a, you know, a publicity stunt. To promote their art and David Blau’s gallery.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Look, Paul, I know it’s backasswards and egotistical, but for a moment I was afraid I was being made sport of.”

“Sport of? What do you mean, sport of?”

“Not after the police arrived. And not really before, either, but nothing that happened at the club seemed real. I felt like an outsider, someone not getting the joke.”

“What cynicism! Five minutes ago you were berating me for hoping for a friendly fuck on the same evening my godson gets abducted!”

“Paul, I was confessing a doubt I had, not leveling an accusation. You’re turning this into something it isn’t.”

I was thoroughly confused. Our conversation had gone off the rails with her plea not to take her next remark wrong. Had I taken it wrong, or had she impugned RuthClaire and Adam’s integrity as artists and parents? I thumbed an antacid tablet out of a roll in my pants pocket and slipped it under my tongue.

“Take me home, Paul. You don’t need me at the hospital. Adam doesn’t need me there, either. I’m sorry this has happened—deeply, deeply sorry.”

I took her home, to an apartment complex on Clifton, not far from the Emory campus. My attempts to get her talking again met with monosyllabic rebuffs. She had wounded me by taking potshots at my friends. I had wounded her by calling her to account for her meanness and vanity.

Caroline’s apartment building had pinkish stucco walls, gables with casement windows, and rustic Tudor trim. I parked beside the walk to her front porch, but before I could even undo my seat buckle, she got out. Then she leaned back down and gave a harsh barking little laugh.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I was about to tell you how much I enjoyed the evening.”

“Oh.”

“Parts of it, I did.” She slammed the door and hiked up her walk like a drill sergeant in the Scandinavian Fashion Force. I waited until she was safely inside before giving a salute and driving wistfully away.

“He’s awake,” the nurse on Adam’s floor said when I showed up at the hospital to fulfill my role as Evil Messenger. “He doesn’t sleep that much anyway, but after Mrs. Montaraz called to tell us you were coming, I went to see if he needed to be awakened. He didn’t.” A middle-aged woman with strong features and eyes like indigo marbles, the nurse tilted her head. “Is there anything I can do, Mr. Loyd?”

“Make sure we’re not disturbed for a while.”

The nurse could not contain herself. “What’s wrong?”

“If RuthClaire didn’t tell you when she called, then I can’t tell you.” My words came out, unintentionally, like a reprimand. I patted the woman’s shoulder to soften their impact. Then I walked down the long, antiseptic corridor.

Adam was sitting up in bed in the dark. He had two pillows behind him, and his legs were crossed beneath his sheet in the lotus position of an Oriental contemplative. The IV bottle beside him, its tube running to his wrist like a life-giving amber fuse, glinted eerily in the darkness. The bandages on his lower face gave him the look of an unfinished plaster-of-Paris bust. He sat remarkably still, and I felt as I had felt as a small boy, approaching my father after some terrible disobedience. I did not reach for the light switch—maybe for reasons of self-concealment. I stood in the doorway letting my eyes adjust and noticing with what stoic endurance Adam’s own eyes tried to allay my fears. Somehow, he had sensed them, like a faint but acrid odor. Don’t quail from necessity, his eyes said. Come sit down.

I crossed the room and sat down in the chair that RuthClaire ordinarily used. But I must have appeared ready to bolt, for Adam lifted the arm attached to the IV tube and gently patted me, as I had patted the nurse.

Go ahead, he was telling me: Be as brutal as your news demands.

“RuthClaire would have come to tell you this, Adam, but circumstances don’t allow. I’m her emissary. I’m here to tell you what nobody—not even your own wife—could tell you easily.”

Adam made a series of signs that somehow permitted me to interpret them.

“No one’s died. So far as we know. Tiny Paul’s been taken.” And I told him in detail what had happened at Sinusoid Disturbances and afterward, including the police’s conviction that we would soon receive a ransom demand and my own speculations about the identities of the kidnappers. At the moment, though, everyone was walking gingerly across a rope bridge over a chasm of indeterminate depth. We would not be able to see how far it was to the bottom until Craig Puddicombe or Nancy Teavers called. Lamely, I concluded, “All we can do is wait.”

Adam pulled the IV tube free of the plastic connector in his wrist and lifted himself up high enough to hook the tube over its pole. There, it ceased to drip. My friend wore one of those hospital gowns with the split up the rear, a design feature of curious motivation. Was the split to make it easier for orderlies to administer enemas, or was it a sartorial aid to patients frequently victimized by sudden diarrhea attacks? These seemed mutually exclusive goals, but the gowns were an immemorial hospital humiliation. Adam managed to wear his without looking totally ridiculous (maybe because nudity held no terror for him), but when he hopped nimbly down from his bed in the garment, I found myself glancing around the room in search of a safety pin with which to close up the vent in back. At Sinusoid Disturbances, I would have had no trouble finding one.

“Adam, what are you doing?”

He brushed past me to the sink and mounted a stair-step stool allowing access to his image in the mirror. His hairy buttocks peeked through the split, and the backs of his thighs tightened and relaxed as he raised and lowered himself on tiptoes. I then realized he was undoing the gauzy cerements binding the lower half of his face.

“Adam!”

He shot me a warning look and resumed unpackaging his jaw. He had already dropped the foam-rubber cup for his chin into the sink. Only the light spilling in from the corridor enabled him to work, but he was peeling off layer after layer with an alacrity that suggested he knew his business. Had he practiced for a moment such as this? It hardly seemed likely, but how else account for the knowledgeable speed of his fingers?

I whispered, “Adam, there’s nothing any of us can do until they call.”

His fingers slowed, but he kept unpeeling gauze.

“What if the kidnappers ring up the nurses’ station instead of the house? If you rush home to RuthClaire, there’ll be nobody here to take their call—nobody who can respond to their demands.” I was improvising, but the possibility sounded realistic to me. “You couldn’t talk to them, of course, but you could authorize me to act as spokesman. Think about it, Adam. Somebody has to be here.”

He shrugged my hand away and finished taking off his bandages. I looked at him in profile. His nose seemed less flat, his cheekbones higher, his chin more pronounced. Not only had the plastic surgeons reconstructed his buccal cavity, they’d given his entire face a modern configuration. None of the changes was severe or blatant, but together they gave him a streamlined, Nilotic handsomeness.

Adam dismounted his stool so that I towered over him again, embarrassed by my moronic tallness. From a hamper he seized a pair of clean white towels, which he folded double and spread out on the floor by the bed. He nodded me down. I knelt on one of the towels, and he, of course, knelt on the other, turning me back into Goliath to his humble shepherd boy.

But, side by side, we prayed. Or, Adam prayed while I knelt beside him with my brow pressed against the mattress edge. “Pray without ceasing,” it says in Thessalonians, but I couldn’t get past the part about forgiving-our-trespasses-as-we-forgive-those-who-trespass, etc., without thinking about Nancy’s perfidy, Caroline’s presumption that the kidnapping was a publicity stunt, or my need to resume my responsibilities at the West Bank. Pray without ceasing? I could do no better than an intermittent, “Don’t let the bastards kill him, God,” between which times I fantasized slitting Craig’s throat, taking Caroline to bed, and catering the reception of a wedding party at Muscadine Gardens—not necessarily in that order or all at once. My knees got sore, my kidneys ached, but somehow I shared Adam’s vigil on the floor for almost three hours.

At 3:57 A.M.—I checked my watch—the nurse came to the door to report that Adam had a telephone call.

“I tried to tell him that this was an absurd hour to call,” she said, “but he told me if I didn’t fetch Mr. Montaraz, I’d ‘live to regret it.’”

“It’s Puddicombe,” I whispered. Aloud I said, “We’ll be down there in two minutes. Go back and tell him.” My heart leapt against my rib cage. Too often, the parents of stolen children hear nothing from the abductors. A break like this one—a break I’d desperately anticipated—was a kind of sardonic miracle.

The nurse left. I banged my forehead against the mattress in despairing joy. The son of a bitch had telephoned! I rocked back on my heels and mouthed a silent thank you. Adam touched my shoulder.

“God. Bless. You,” he managed.

I gaped at him. Adam had spoken, and never had I heard a voice so oddly pitched and modulated: a scratchy computer struggling to sound human. Impulsively, I hugged the little man. Holding him at arm’s length, I told him he’d better put on a pair of pants. If we were too long getting to the nurses’ station, Puddicombe—or whoever it was—would get antsy about the delay and hang up. I rubbed two fingers along the side of my nose. They came away wet.

A pair of khaki trousers his only clothing, Adam accompanied me to the nurses’ station. The duty nurse waited for us with her hand over the telephone mouthpiece.

“Is there an extension?” I said.

She nodded at the glass-walled office behind the counter. “In there. If you want to, you can cradle the receiver on a speaker device, and it’ll broadcast like a radio.”

“Good,” I said. “You don’t happen to have a tape recorder too, do you?”

“Another nurse, Andrea, has a jam box, a big silver thing she hauls around to deafen her elders with. It also records. Andrea leaves her tapes in the drawer. You can tape over one of those—if you take responsibility for ruining a favorite of hers.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

At which point the nurse realized that Adam’s face was free of its bandages. “Oh, my God! Those weren’t supposed to come off yet. Dr. Ruggiero will flay me alive.”

“No, he won’t,” I said. “Mr. Montaraz is healing nicely.”

I led Adam into the office, found the jam box, rummaged up an unmarked tape, put it in the machine, and pressed the record button. Then I set the telephone receiver into the amplifier unit and depressed the lighted button on the base of the telephone. The nurse, having observed all this through the glass, hung up her phone and left to make a tour of the floor—efficient and discreet, that good woman.

“We’re here,” I told the caller.

“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked, two syllables that identified him: Craig Puddicombe. He had made no effort to disguise his voice. (If the restaurant business ever got too tame for me, maybe I could go into police work.)

I told Craig who I was.

“The first dude in history to let a hibber snake his old lady.”

“We were divorced when RuthClaire married Adam.”

“Yeah. You even played pimp for ’em, didn’t you? Now you’re in the hospital holding the hibber’s hand. Jesus, Mr. Loyd, you take the cake.”

“But you and Nancy took the child. What do you—?”

Puddicombe broke in: “Get your tape recorders all set up? Get a call off to the police? That why you took so goddamn long pickin’ up the phone?”

“Adam had to dress. His room’s at the far—”

“Stuff that, Mr. Loyd.” He said something to somebody in the room with him, but it was all muffled, indistinct. Then: “Prove to me the hibber’s really there.”

“How? You know he can’t talk.”

“He can sing, can’t he? He can hum like a rotary engine.”

“Craig, he’s had an operation. His face is bandaged. The entire lower portion of his face was remodeled.”

“He’ll still be stump-ugly to me. Have him hum through his bandages.”

I started to protest, but Adam took my handkerchief from my coat pocket, tied it around his face as a bandanna, and stepped to the amplifier to hum a Cokesbury hymn.

“That’s the hibber, all right—a mule brayin’ into a barrel.”

“Prove you’ve got Tiny Paul,” I said.

“How? You wanna hear him scream?”

Adam stopped humming—half lament, half yodel—and removed the bandanna. He shook his head in response to Craig’s last question.

“Never mind,” I said. “What do you want?”

“A ransom. If Mister and Missus Hibber give it to us, they’ll get their filthy little whatever-it-is back.”

“How much money, Craig?”

“Who said anything about money?”

This reply shocked me. What sort of ransom required no monetary payoff?

“Y’all still there?” Craig asked.

“Tell us your terms. We’re listening.”

Craig consulted with his accomplice. Then, as if reading from a script, he said, “We don’t want money. We don’t do violence. What we want is what’s right. You may think the brat’s been taken because his hibber daddy killed E. L. You may think we covet what the brat’s unnatural family has built up for itself since the hibber did that killin’. It ain’t so, though, neither of those things. We took the brat to make some undone justice get done. We took him to set some wrong things right.”

This nonsense scared me. “Come on, Craig, get to the point.”

“Have a little patience,” the amplifier said, mockingly polite. A paper rattled. “You get your little half-breed back if and when you do the following. First, Mister and Missus Hibber they stop livin’ together. Second, they tell the papers and the TV they’ve stopped and they regret the sinful example they’ve set decent whites and blacks all over the world by bringin’ their mongrel brat into it. Third, they—”

“Craig,” I pleaded.

“Third, they apologize to the parents, family, and widow of E. L. Teavers, my friend. And fourth, the hibber gives himself up for trial on charges of—” a meaningful pause—“uh, malicious homicide.”

“Craig, E. L. was trying to kill Adam. You and your crew had kidnapped us, for God’s sake—the same way you and Nancy have abducted Tiny Paul. Not a court in the world would convict Adam of anything but saving all our lives!”

“Look, we was just tryin’ to scare some sense into you. Nobody out to Snyder’s place was gonna get kilt—until your goddamn hibber chucked E. L. down that hole.”

“But E. L. was trying to do that to Adam, Craig!”

“Puttin’ your hibber down a hole didn’t kill him, did it? Him and his kind lived hundreds of damn centuries in caves. So puttin’ a hibber down a brick-kiln hole hurts it ’bout as much as tossin’ Br’er Rabbit into a damn briar patch. He popped back out, didn’t he? That proves it.”

Absurd. Puddicombe and I were working from entirely different sets of premises. I changed tacks: “Is that it? Four things to do to get T. P. back?”

“We got a fifth un.” Our tormentor rattled his prepared text. “Inasmuch as Mister and Missus Hibber have made big bucks from the dirty degenerates of American society, and are richer than all but the upright and godly ought to be, they’ve got to—” Craig halted. His fancy lead-in had taken some steam out of his delivery. “Inasmuch as all that, they’ve got to contribute fifty thousand dollars to ten different charities and political groups of our choosing. They’ll get the list on Monday or Tuesday. Each group gets at least three thousand, but—and this is big of us, now—Mister and Missus Hibber get to decide how to ladle out the twenty thousand left over after the first split.”

“Money. It comes down to money.”

“The money ain’t important, Mr. Loyd. It’s not for us, anyhow. It’s only ’cause they got it and don’t deserve it and need to give it to somebody who does—that’s why we’re makin’ ’em do it. They do it by check, too. We need to see the canceled checks as proof that everything’s been done like we asked. The list comin’ in the mail will explain the whole system.”

Angry, I said: “They won’t get T. P. back until the canceled checks come in?”

“Actually, not till after they’ve split up, broken their ungodly marriage, and lived apart long enough to show us they’ve really done it.”

“Craig, give us a time frame? How long will you hold Tiny Paul? There’s no give-and-take here. For you, it’s open-ended. For RuthClaire and Adam, it’s a nightmare. And if they’re living apart when you release the kid, who will you release him to?”

“To your ex-old lady, of course. The hibber don’t have any rights in this.”

“But how long, Craig. Play fair, damn it!”

“They’ll know when we do, won’t they?” And he hung up. The speaker on the amplifier was amplifying a dial tone. No way to trace the call. It had come through the hospital’s central switching system. So Craig Puddicombe and Nancy Teavers, with T. P. in their doubtful care, had sunk again into the impenetrable anonymity of a metropolitan area with nearly four million people—if they hadn’t made their call from Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, or one of the Carolinas. And even if they were still in Greater Atlanta, they had more than a hundred square miles of labyrinthine territory in which to go to ground.

Adam slumped into the chair at the desk. His voice, when he spoke, was a series of agonized croaks: “I wish. Miss RuthClaire. Had let. McElroy. Baptize him.”

Adam decided to leave Emory Hospital. While I telephoned RuthClaire, he dressed, packed a suitcase, and faced down the bemused night nurse with a painful repetition of the words, “Goodbye, goodbye. Going now.” During this confrontation, he maintained the dignified decorum of a Japanese charge d’affaires. When I got off the phone, the nurse put through a hasty call to one of Adam’s doctors, who at first voiced angry opposition to our plans to decamp at this hour. Talking to me, though, he at last gave his reluctant consent, and the orderlies who had been summoned to keep Adam and me from hijacking an elevator to freedom backed off. The nurse then rode downstairs with us, reminding Adam to eat nothing chewier than oatmeal until Dr. Ruggiero had examined him again and noting that he would not be able to speak as well as he wished until he had undergone his scheduled speech therapy.

At the Montaraz house, only a few minutes later, RuthClaire ran to Adam and embraced him. I stood just inside the door connecting the kitchen to the big downstairs studio. The other three men present were Bilker Moody and the same pair of GBI agents who had driven RuthClaire and me back to the Snyder property on the day after our abduction from the West Bank: Niedrach and Davison. They wore nondescript business suits of flimsy black cotton, almost as if they had picked their outfits off the same rack. Davison, however, sported a beige Banlon shirt under his jacket, while Niedrach had made his own distinguishing fashion statement with a red clip-on tie and a red canvas belt on whose buckle shone the embossed head of the mascot of the University of Georgia, a bulldog wearing a freshman’s beanie.

Bilker’s opinion of the GBI agents revealed itself in the curl of his upper lip.

At last Adam and RuthClaire separated, and RuthClaire reintroduced everyone. I gave Niedrach the cassette on which I’d recorded Craig’s ransom demands. A tape player was produced, and the GBI men sat down to listen to the cassette. Bilker retreated to the bar, Adam paced, and RuthClaire perched on the arm of the divan beside Niedrach. I squatted opposite the divan on the other side of the marble coffee table.

“We don’t want money. We don’t do violence. What we want is what’s right. You may think the brat’s been taken…” And so on, to the end.

Niedrach said, “That’s by far the craziest set of ransom demands I’ve ever heard.”

Sitting hunched on a high-gloss red bar stool, Bilker drawled, “The reason you’re dumfuzzled is that this ain’t a kidnapping anymore.”

Niedrach raised his eyebrows. “No? What is it, then? A dope deal?”

“A hostage situation.”

“Every kidnap victim is a hostage,” Niedrach countered with as much tact as he could muster. “That’s tautological.”

“Yeah. Logical ’cause you’ve been taught it. But a hostage situation’s different from a kidnappin’. Money ain’t the perpetrator’s number-one priority. It’s the pursuit of a far-out political or ideological goal by means of terroristic threats.”

“He told us they wouldn’t kill Paulie,” RuthClaire said.

Bilker revolved a half-turn this way, a half-turn the other. Because of his bulk, I half expected the legs of the stool to screw curls of hardwood up around themselves as they sank into the floor. “Yeah, well, Puddicombe’s cooler than any kidnapper ’cause the Great White Jehovah, Jumper of Jigaboos, is on his side. He’ll take more chances than a two-bit kidnapper. If you push him, he’ll raise the stakes.”

“The stakes he’s playing for are revenge,” I said.

“Mebbe so. But he gets it by makin’ us dance to his fiddlin’, not by crashin’ the Montarazes’ bank accounts.”

“So?” said Niedrach.

“We better dance to his fiddlin’. Or make it look like we are. Otherwise, he’ll—pardon me, Mrs. Montaraz—he’ll off his hostage.”

Davison said, “How do you know so much about it?”

“Mebbe I watch the CBS Evening News.”

Niedrach stood and pocketed his hands. “Mr. Moody’s pegged this exactly right. Now we know it’s a kidnapping—or a hostage situation involving a kidnap victim—the FBI will assume primary responsibility for the case. We’ve got to contact them.”

“But you and Mr. Davison have been through this with us before,” RuthClaire said. “The FBI won’t dump you fellows completely, will they?”

“I’ll try to make that point, Mrs. Montaraz, in telling them what’s happened so far. Meantime, though, Adam—Mr. Montaraz, I mean—should move out, to give every appearance of complying with the sickies’ demands. Mr. Moody’s right about that.”

Bilker grunted, startled to find an ally where he’d posited a bungling bureaucrat.

RuthClaire said, “I can’t believe Nancy’d let anything happen to Paulie.”

“Nancy may be in as much danger as your son,” Niedrach said.

And so it was decided that Adam would leave the house on Hurt Street. Niedrach would have a secretary at the state GBI offices telephone the Atlanta newspapers with an anonymous tip about the deteriorating marital situation of the Montarazes. She would claim to be a neighbor with firsthand knowledge of their troubles, including a confidence from RuthClaire that her husband had agreed to a trial separation requiring his immediate departure from the household. RuthClaire would grant the papers a tight-lipped interview omitting any mention of the abduction and confirming the anonymous friend’s separation story.

“But a separation on what grounds?” RuthClaire pleaded.

“Anything you can think of that doesn’t strike you as unseemly,” Niedrach said.

Adam tried to speak, but his gravelly computer voice would not cooperate, and he reverted to sign language. RuthClaire interpreted it for us. “Career incompatibility,” she said. “We’ve been arguing about Adam’s career plans. I want him to keep painting, but he wishes to enroll—” she struggled to read his gestures correctly— “in the Candler School of Theology at Emory. He wishes to take the curriculum leading to the Master of Theological Studies degree. I’ll tell the reporter that Adam has gone off the deep end on matters God-related.”

“That’s great,” Niedrach said. “That’s inspired.”

Davison grimaced. “A habiline religious nut?” Yes. Apparently so. The point of the ruse, of course, was to get word to Craig that RuthClaire and Adam had stopped living together. The story’s appearance in print would insure its finding its way onto local TV news broadcasts, where Craig could monitor recent muggings, rapes, street-name changes, city-council shouting matches, and mayoral trips overseas.

“What’s the chance of the media catchin’ wind of the kidnappin’ itself?” Bilker asked.

“Dust-ups at Sinusoid Disturbances are a regular thing,” Davison replied. “We’re in the clear for now.”

Niedrach said, “Puddicombe may break the news himself. Publicity doesn’t worry him. He might even like it. So if the story leaks, Paulie won’t be in any more—or any less—danger than he already is.”

Where was Adam going to move to? We mulled the options. He needed a shelter offering privacy as well as a certain remoteness from the urban bustle of Atlanta. What qualified? A rented house in Alpharetta? A lakeside cottage in Cherokee County? The monastery in Conyers?

“Let him come to Paradise Farm with me,” I suggested.

RuthClaire said, “Wouldn’t Craig look askance at that? You’re my ex-husband. You’re also Paulie’s godfather.”

“Two castoffs commiserating,” I said. “It’s honky-on-hibber marriage that upsets Puddicombe, not white and black males cohabiting.”

“What would that do to our cover story about his decision to attend the Candler School of Theology?”

Adam signed again, and RuthClaire said, “It’s too late to enroll for summer term there, and fall semester doesn’t officially start until the last Monday in August.”

“So the alibi holds,” Niedrach said. “Take him with you, Mr. Loyd. We’ve got an agent in Hothlepoya County investigating the drug scene there. He’ll act as a go-between, relaying information from us to you and vice versa. So go on.”

“When?”

“As soon as he can get ready to go. Now, if possible.”

RuthClaire and Adam climbed upstairs to get him packed for his stay at Paradise Farm, and to tell each other goodbye. Bilker and the GBI agents, discreetly embarrassed by this turn of events, huddled in the kitchen drinking coffee and swapping companionable tall tales about their prowess as bodyguards and their expertise as sleuths.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” I told them.

Davison, who had draped his black jacket over his chair, blurted, “An hour? Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

“To tell somebody goodbye.”

I drove to Caroline’s—not in her little blue beetle, but in my big silver Mercedes. I arrived at 9:37 A.M., bleary-eyed, funky, and anxious about the deadline I’d set myself. An hour? I now had only forty-six minutes. It might take me that long to convince my hapless generative equipment that it could still pretend to that title. It might take me longer to convince the lovely Caroline to let me try to convince my equipment. Wasn’t I presuming too much?

Staggering along the walk to her porch, I felt that I was bound in a pair of tinfoil shorts. I itched. I had not slept all night. My stubbly beard seemed to be infested with microscopic lumberjacks sawing away at every follicle. Who—whom—was I kidding? I had no chance with this lady.

Forty-four minutes.

At last at her door, I leaned with one elbow and all my bathetic longing into the tiny button that rang her bell—her dear, melodious bell. Inside her apartment chimed the opening eight notes of “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. They chimed over and over again because I was too weary to pull back my elbow.

Forty-three minutes.

“Who is it?” Caroline’s voice cried.

“Me.”

She opened the three inches her safety-chain allowed. “What do you want?”

“A friendly fee-fi-fo-fum.”

“Has anything happened? Have they found Paulie?”

I tried to alchemize my weary nonchalance into concerned sobriety. “Listen, Caroline, if you’ll—”

“That’s not my car,” she said, peering past me. “How am I going to get my car home?” She shook her head. “Damn! That’s not important. The important thing is Paulie. I’m still three-quarters asleep.”

“If you’ll let me in, I’ll tell you all I—”

Caroline unhooked the chain. The door opened, and she was standing against a backdrop of framed Broadway posters, porcelain flower vases, and at least two copper umbrella holders. The breath of the apartment’s air-conditioning rippled over me. As for Caroline herself, she wore a yellow dressing gown that seemed to be lined with layer upon liquid-thin layer of an even paler material. She looked and smelled like the demigoddess of a fragrant wheat field.

“You have to shower. And talk to me. And eat breakfast here.”

“Forty-one minutes,” I said. “I’ve got forty-one minutes.”

“Listen, Mr. Loyd, there’s a clock in every room but the bathroom. You can hang your watch on the shower spigot for all I care. If you have any sense, though, you’ll forget about your stupid forty-one minutes and put your watch in one of your shoes.” She pulled me inside and shut us both into her apartment’s Fundy Bay briskness.

As matters unfolded, I put my Elgin in one of my shoes and deliberately forgot about it.

I spent more than forty-one minutes at Caroline’s. I spent more than eighty-two minutes at Caroline’s. In fact, I didn’t make it back to Hurt Street until better than two hours after my departure—but neither Bilker nor the GBI agents scolded me, for Caroline, fetching in old jeans and a bright yellow tank top, had accompanied me. She had to pick up her VW, didn’t she? Further, as a witness to the crime, she wished to accommodate Niedrach and Davison by recounting the event from her point of view. Wouldn’t they have sought her out eventually, anyway? They admitted they would have.

“And RuthClaire might like having another woman around for a while today,” I said. “It won’t be easy for her with Adam gone and only Bilker’s shoulder to cry on.”

Bilker snorted, in agreement rather than indignation.

And when the Montarazes came downstairs, RuthClaire and Caroline embraced like long-lost siblings unexpectedly reunited, and as they did, Adam and I carried his belongings out to my car for the trip to Beulah Fork. Bilker lent a hand. Even on its high-performance shocks, the rear of my Mercedes began to sag. Adam had added to his own luggage at least three dozen of RuthClaire’s more recent paintings. Although fairly small, the canvases were still affixed to their frames, and Bilker and I had to struggle to wedge them into the trunk between the suitcases and the pasteboard boxes.

“Adam, what’s the point of taking the paintings?”

“Remembrance,” he gargled.

Because it hurt for him to speak, I did not question him further—but it occurred to me that he was preparing for a long separation from RuthClaire. This was not a surrender to despair, though, but an act of faith. If he and his wife were to be reunited with their child, they would have to accede to and endure the stipulations of the kidnappers. With luck, the GBI might break the case, but there was no guarantee.

These paintings—the drab acrylics she’d hopefully entitled Souls—still seemed to me the least distinguished work of RuthClaire’s career: blatant mediocrities. Only a uxorious husband could love them. I scratched my head. Adam was not the uxorious sort, but his fondness for this series—when, for “remembrances,” he could have taken better examples of his wife’s art—truly puzzled me.

We got away from Atlanta shortly after noon. On our drive down, Adam read. He had a stack of hardcover titles on the floorboard, and he seemed to pick up and peruse a new one every fifteen minutes or so. Does God Exist? and Eternal Life? by Hans Küng, God and the Astronomers by Robert Jastrow, God and the New Physics by Paul Davies, The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman, Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, an anthology entitled The Mind’s I by a pair of editors whose names escape me. I don’t know what all else. I had the impression that Adam was sampling these texts, checking passages that he’d underlined in previous readings, rather than trying to devour each volume whole for the first time—but even this formidable intellectual feat had its intimidating aspects. Out of respect for his admirable focus, I kept my mouth shut.

At Paradise Farm, unloading, I broke my quirky vow of silence: “Adam, you know the story you told RuthClaire to tell the reporter about your reasons for separating?” He raised his eyebrows. “The one about entering the seminary this fall?”

“Yes?” he croaked.

“That alleged fiction came to you so quickly, I wondered if… well, if it might really be something you’d like to try.”

“Oh, yes,” he managed. “I. Have. Thought. About. It.”

Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and our latest little waitress from Tocqueville Junior College did not jump for joy on my return. An hour earlier, a tour bus from Muscadine Gardens had dropped off forty people at the West Bank. These people had descended like a flock of crows, eaten a dozen different menu items, left a skimpy collective tip, and flown away in their bus with a rude backfire.

“Did you give them the substitutes they wanted?”

Livia George sat spraddle-legged at a table near the cash register. “Don’ I always, Mistah Paul?”

“Everybody was taken care of?”

She gave me a disgusted look. “We turned you a pretty profit, and we done been doin’ that the whole live-long week. You jes’ like a man runs up to put out a fire when it’s awreddy burnt down his house.”

“Livvy, you say the sweetest things.”

“How’s Mistah Adam?” she asked, sitting up straight to wipe her brow. “How’s Miss RuthClaire?”

“Fine,” I lied. “Fine.”

I made some noises about the apparent success of Adam’s operation, but beyond that partial truth I could not comfortably go. To prevent any further discussion of the matter, I helped clean up the restaurant and stayed on for the five-o’clock dinner crowd. Our receipts for the day were encouraging, and I drove Livia George home without once mentioning that I had a guest in my house.

Next morning, closer to noon than to sunup, the TV set downstairs awakened me.

I knotted my terrycloth robe at my waist and stumbled barefoot down the steps to find Adam cross-legged on the floor with a section of the Sunday Journal-Constitution strewn around him and my RCA XL-100’s screen flickering with ill-defined violet and magenta images of Dwight “Happy” McElroy’s Great Gospel Giveaway broadcast.

“‘This is my story, this is my song,’” sang the hundred-member choir behind McElroy. “‘Praising my Savior all the day long!’”

Shots of the choir alternated with wide-angle pans of the congregation in McElroy’s huge Televangelism Center in Rehoboth, Louisiana. This soaring, baroquely buttressed structure had been paid for by the four-bit to five-dollar donations of hundreds of thousands of low-income subscribers to the doctrinal guidelines of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc. Despite the raddled colors on my picture tube, I could see that attending the service were more enraptured souls than you could usually find at the Omni during an Atlanta Hawks basketball game. Seven thousand people? Ten? However many there were, they must have converged on Rehoboth from every city and hamlet on the Gulf Coast, not excluding Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile. The blessed place rocked.

“Ah,” I said. “Your favorite show.”

Adam had already dressed: a pair of light brown bush shorts and an orange T-shirt celebrating the pleasures of River Street in Savannah. He handed me a section of the paper called “The Arts.”

“Turn first page,” he growled, but, overnight, his speech had become more fluid.

I obeyed. What greeted my eye on the inside page was this headline:

Beside the brief story was a file photograph of Adam and RuthClaire in “happier times,” namely, at the opening of his Abraxas show in February. My face was a smudge of dots among other ill-defined faces in the background.

“That was quick, wasn’t it?”

I read the story. It quoted RuthClaire to the effect that Adam’s pursuit of spiritual fulfillment had left him little time for either Tiny Paul or her. She still loved him, but that very love insisted that she give him what he most wanted, a chance to study at Candler without family encumbrances. She wanted to support him in his quest for a theological degree, but all he wanted was complete freedom. No one alive fully understood the habiline mind, but in some ways Adam’s outlook was that of a medieval ascetic with a calling for the priesthood. Had she not intercepted him on his northward trek through Georgia two years ago, almost certainly he would have discovered his spiritual bent without first marrying.

Adam grunted. “She does not add. That ‘almost certainly.’ I would have. Stayed a naked animal.”

“Never mind. You still end up looking like a horse’s butt, Adam.”

“‘A horse’s butt?’”

“What kind of man leaves his wife and son to study religion? Jesus.”

“I do not care. How I end up. Looking. To people who do not know me.”

“You just want Paulie back?”

“Yes.”

On Gospel Giveaway, the words of McElroy’s sermon rolled from him like Gulf Coast combers in hurricane season, powerful, dangerous, unrelenting. (Of course, there was also the ever-present inset of the woman interpreting the sermon for deaf viewers, her hands flashing like hungry seagulls.) Suddenly, though, McElroy held up a copy of the same section of the Atlanta paper now in my own hands.

“…a continuing assault on the American family,” he thundered, waving the newspaper at his auditors. “I’d planned to apologize today for my overzealousness last summer in castigatin’ the former RuthClaire Loyd for livin’ in sin with a male creature not her husband. Well, it’s long since become evident to everybody that this so-called creature is a man. He and Miss RuthClaire were in fact husband and wife at the time of their apparent illicit cohabitation. That bein’ so, they deserved an apology. Why, this past week I visited Adam Montaraz at a hospital in Atlanta, laid my hands square on his head, and baptized him into the everlastin’ glory and the ever-glorious communion of the Body of Christ. Say Amen!”

The people in the Televangelism Center roared, “Amen!”

“At the same time, I unburdened my spirit of its load of guilt and sorrow to both Montarazes, callin’ upon them to forgive me in the great and gracious name of Jesus Christ. And did they forgive me? I believe they did, and I went away fully convicted that here were two righteous human bein’s saved from sin and despair by faith in God and their humble devotion to each other.”

“To God give the glory!” a member of the audience cried.

“But this morning I read that this same couple, so concerned and carin’ only five days ago, has fallen to the epidemic of sundered relationships ravagin’ our country the way the plague once ravaged Europe! This story wounds me so bad because RuthClaire Montaraz has broken her marriage for one incredible reason—nothing more terrible than her husband’s desire to… to study for the ministry!”

The congregation groaned collectively.

Adam sprang up from the floor and punched the button turning the set off. “That. Son. Of. Bitch,” he enunciated.

“RuthClaire didn’t let him baptize T. P. He resents her for that, Adam. He’s trying to get back at her.”

“He has. Misread the story. I am the one. Who has deserted my family.”

“Adam, it’s all a fabrication. Everything in that story.”

Adam struggled to explain himself: “But he has misread, even, the fabrication. A person working for a Master of Theological Studies… is not preparing for the ministry. That is the degree of a lay person. Mr. McElroy should know that.”

“RuthClaire balked him. That’s all he knows.”

“So he blackens her name from his pulpit? For oh-so-many viewers? Is that what he does?” Adam stopped pacing, rubbed his lower jaw, and pointed a bony finger at the blank screen. “Dwight ‘Happy’ McElroy, you are a… very unpleasant… son of bitch.”

I calmed Adam down and got him into the kitchen where, remembering the orders of Dr. Ruggiero, I prepared him a plate of soft scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. Adam ate ravenously, polishing off his eggs before turning his spoon to the still steaming, cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal.

The West Bank was closed on Sundays, not so much to honor the sabbath as to acknowledge the mores of the townspeople who honored it. And, like God, I myself was not opposed to twenty-four hours of uninterrupted rest every seven days. At any rate, that afternoon Adam and I entertained ourselves preparing a makeshift gallery display of RuthClaire’s paintings Souls in her old studio. We organized them by dividing them into five groups of seven canvases each, scrupulously assigning different background colors and frame sizes to each group—after which we either hung them or propped them on shelves or tables where they would show off to best advantage.

Warm afternoon sun came through the dusty Venetian blinds in zebra stripes of marmalade and shadow. Then, when I hoisted the blinds, the same light flooded the entire studio. Prismatic dazzle bounced around the room, and our placement of the canvases, along with the sunlight streaming in, transformed them from muddy, earthbound mistakes into oddly spectacular affirmations of their creator’s talent.

“My God,” I said.

Adam pointed at this canvas and then at that, daring me to note how the finishes that had once seemed flat and monolithic now had depth and intricacy. Under the mute pastels lay eloquent patterns of shape and line, iridescent commentaries on the otherwise commonplace surfaces in which they were embedded.

“I never saw any of this before. It’s hard to believe.”

“I know,” Adam said.

“Is this the way you always see them?”

“Of course not.”

“But the other way, they’re inexcusably ugly… hardly worth keeping.”

“Sometimes they might seem so. I have heard Miss RuthClaire admit the same.”

“A desire to undo them? A desire to destroy them?”

“Yes. But only when she has got… beyond them.”

Above Paradise Farm, summer clouds pushed in from the west, mounting one another like amorous sheep. The light in the studio changed. Someone had swaddled the sun in gauze.

“They’re ruined,” I said, meaning the paintings. “They’re back to normal.”

Adam gave me a funny look. Then he patted my shoulder: Don’t fret, Mister Paul.

A golden glory poured through the summer clouds. Only a little less dazzling than before, sunlight pirouetted through the studio. I looked again at RuthClaire’s paintings. No transcendence. The infinitesimal change in the light had somehow leached them of magic. And no matter how hard I tried over the next few days, I was never able to enter the studio at a time when the light slanted in at the necessary angle and chromatic intensity to bring the canvases back to life.

On Monday morning, Adam and I each tried to disguise from the other our individual senses of expectancy. Today RuthClaire was supposed to receive from Craig a letter stipulating the groups—charities, political organizations—to which the Montarazes must write their ransom checks.

At 10:01, I began to get ready to drive into town for my luncheon business. Niedrach should have called, I told myself. But I withdrew that thought, doubting the security of Beulah Fork’s telephone lines. Craig did not need to know where Adam had gone, only that he’d moved away from the big cupola’d house on Hurt Street. As for Adam, he was walking barefoot through my pecan grove, contemplating his and RuthClaire’s misfortune. I went down my sundeck steps to talk to him. “If anything happens here, keep me posted. Call me at the West Bank. Even if Livia George answers the phone, she won’t recognize your voice. She’s never heard it before.”

Before Adam could reply, a vehicle crunched through the gravel on the circular drive fronting the house. Who? Friend, foe, or unsuspecting Avon lady?

“Get inside,” I said. “I’ll check this out.”

Adam obeyed. In the sweltering midmorning heat, I trotted around the house beneath the studio loft and turned the corner in time to see a male figure climbing down from the cab of a glossy violet pickup. The truck was jacked up so high on its oversized wheels that the man’s final step was a low-level parachute jump. He saw me the moment he landed and stood staring at me with a resolute skepticism. “You Mr. Loyd?”

“Depends on who I’m talking to.”

Neither clean-shaven nor bearded, neither a Beau Brummell nor a hobo, the man closed the distance between us. “A chameleon, huh? Well, so am I, I guess.” He halted about five feet away, his outfit that of a pulpwood worker: khaki pants, blue work shirt, rope-soled shoes, and a ball cap with a perforated crown.

“I’m Special Agent Neil Hammond. Can we go inside?”

These words lifted a weight. I shook Hammond’s hand and led him inside through the narrow front foyer. We found Adam sitting on the stairs with a shoeshine kit applying cordovan polish to the hand-tooled leather boots (with elevator heels) he’d worn to the West Bank in December. In his slacks and T-shirt, in his dedication to the simple task, Adam reminded me of an elderly black man who had shined shoes at the Ralston Hotel in Columbus in the early 1960s. Sitting halfway up the stairs, he nodded at Hammond and me without ceasing to rub polish into the toes and heels of his boots. There was an air of melancholy to his expertise, but a melancholy devoid of self-pity. Hammond and I watched him work. Adam finished applying the wax, tugged his left boot on, grasped a shoeshine brush with his bare right foot, and buffed the instep of the boot with an easy rocking motion that made a whispery noise in the stairwell. This sound was strangely soothing. Adam brought the left boot to a high cordovan shine, then removed it and duplicated the procedure in reverse, wearing the right boot and brushing it with his left foot. Hammond and I stood there beneath him in the stairwell, entranced.

“Done,” Adam said. He positioned the polished pair of boots on the step so that the toes were even with its outer edge. They shone. They smelled good.

Then Special Agent Hammond began to speak. He had just arrived from Atlanta with a photocopy of the letter addressed to the Montarazes by the kidnappers. On Saturday, the GBI had received federal authorization to fetch the letter from the U.S. Postal Service in advance of its scheduled Monday delivery. That was how he had managed to bring the message to Adam so early in the day. For the past month, Hammond explained, he’d been doing undercover investigation for the Bureau’s drug unit in Hothlepoya County. Yesterday morning, he’d been summoned back to Atlanta to assume the role of message runner for this particular case. He was living in a mobile home between Beulah Fork and Tocqueville, frequenting grubby roadhouses every evening to see if any dope deals were going down, and periodically staking out the Muscadine Gardens private airport to determine if any of the aircraft coming into it were pot planes. Although it might be wise if Adam and I kept our contacts with him to an absolute minimum, Niedrach wanted us to know that Hammond was our official liaison in Hothlepoya County.

“The letter,” Adam croaked.

Hammond went up the steps with the photocopy. I climbed to a spot behind Adam so I could read it over his shoulder. It was a tight fit for the three of us—but we arranged ourselves cozily enough, and Adam shook out the photocopy.

“Fingerprints on the envelope have already conclusively identified the author as Craig Puddicombe,” Hammond said.

The letter consisted of an introductory paragraph, a list of the ten organizations to receive donations from the Montarazes, and a final paragraph directing them to post the “genuine canceled chex” in a glass case at the interior entrance to Rich’s department store in Lenox Square Mall. The “genuine canceled chex” had to be posted by the second Monday in August, two weeks away, so that thousands upon thousands of mall patrons could view them as they entered Rich’s. The well-known signatures on these checks, and the surprising fringe organizations on their PAY TO THE ORDER OF lines, would surely stimulate a flood of copy-cat contributions. Also, nearly every young person who glanced at the canceled-check display would become a suspect in the kidnapping—assuming, of course, that either the FBI or the GBI set up continuous video surveillance of the store’s entrance.

“Which we will,” Hammond said. “This isn’t as clever a ploy as Puddicombe thinks. It’ll be very easy to fake the canceled checks.”

I tapped the photocopy. “He says he’ll ask the organizations in question if the contributions have really been made.”

“A bluff, Mr. Loyd. Why have the canceled checks posted in a public place if they already know what posting the check is supposed to prove?”

“For publicity’s sake,” I said. “To humiliate RuthClaire and Adam.”

Adam looked up. “Would these organizations actually take our forced donations, Mr. Hammond?” His most fluid speech yet.

“Some are outfits of dubious probity. They might. It seems to be this character’s idea that we’re to keep the kidnapping hidden from the general public—at least for now. That being the case, the outfits receiving the checks would have no reason to suppose you’d sent them under duress.”

“Couldn’t they tell their directors in private?” I asked.

“Of course. But that would entail a certain risk. If Puddicombe has an informant in just one of them, he’d figure out damned fast we’re using the same line of approach with all the other organizations. The danger to the kidnap victim is clear.”

“Say nothing to any of them, then,” Adam directed. “We will send only genuine cashable checks.”

“After Paulie’s recovered, Mr. Montaraz, there are steps we can take to recover the money, too. It’s possible a few of these outfits, understanding the full situation, would hand it over willingly—but it’s also likely that a couple of them, maybe more, wouldn’t mind profiting from your ill fortune. We’d go after them via the state attorney general’s office, but it could prove a messy set-to. Even a loud public outcry against one of these goofy bunches—Shock Troops of the Resurrected Confederacy—might not make them relent. It might even strengthen their will to take on our mainstream legal apparatus.”

“About the money I have no care,” Adam said. “Let it go.”

Looking over his shoulder, I studied the list. In addition to Congressman Aubrey O’Seamons, the Klairvoyant Empire of KuKlos Klandom, and the Shock Troops of the Resurrected Confederacy (STORC), Craig had specified an odd array of praiseworthy, semirespectable, and doubtful groups. The Methodist Children’s Home in Atlanta was cheek by jowl with the National Rifle Association and the Rugged White Survivalists of America. Neither Adam nor I could help noting that the last organization on the list was Dwight McElroy’s Greater Christian Constituency. Ever helpful, Craig had provided up-to-date mailing addresses for each and every one of these organizations.

“You give twenty-three thousand to the Methodist Children’s Home,” I advised Adam. “Three thousand each to the other nine groups.”

Adam said, “We lack so much money in our bank account, Mr. Hammond.”

“If you’re sure you want to handle this by writing the checks,” he said, “we’ll deposit the amount needed to cover them—to fortify our case in seeking reimbursement from any really hard-nosed ransom recipient. Remember, though, that if you’d let us, our documents division could easily fake the canceled checks.”

“Craig Puddicombe would find out,” Adam objected.

“That’s a very real possibility.”

“Then I must ask the aid of state in making up the total fifty thousand dollars.”

“All right,” Hammond said.

For a time, we sat in silence in the narrow chute of the stairwell, stymied by the harsh reality of the letter in Adam’s hands. Is every vice a corrupted virtue, every evil a perverted good? I don’t know, but the anguish and pain that Craig Puddicombe, a mere boy, was inflicting on the Montarazes—and on me by my willing involvement in their predicament—stemmed entirely from his pursuit of a variety of justice that was not only blind but tone-deaf and unfeeling. Further, he had implicated Nancy Teavers in his militant passion for left-handed justice. How, I wondered, could one misguided person trigger such ever-widening chaos?

“What now?” I asked Hammond.

“Mr. Montaraz writes the checks, addresses the envelopes, and gives them to me to mail from a letter box in downtown Atlanta. And then you two fellas wait.”

“Two weeks?” Adam asked. “Another two weeks?”

When I reached the West Bank later that morning, Livia George came at me out of the kitchen with a section of Sunday’s paper rolled up like a rolling pin. She knocked me into a chair by the door with it.

“You tole me they was fine! You tole me Adam was healin’ up real pretty ’n’ evverthin’ else was hunky-dory too!”

“Hey, I thought it was.”

“Their marriage done broke and you think that’s a up-tight development? Where you get your smarts, Mistah Paul? A Jay Cee Penney catalogue?” She laid the newspaper down, flattened it in front of me, and read aloud the story of Adam’s decision to forsake his family for an intense period of study at the Candler School of Theology. “I nevah figgered him a no-’count, Mistah Paul. Not for half a minute. Whyn’t you talk him out o’ this scheme while you was up there?”

“He was bandaged from his operation. Neither let on they were having trouble.”

“Poo!”

“Livvy, they waited till I’d left town to divulge their story to the press. That was deliberate. They hoodwinked me—to spare me the agony of their agony.”

“You go ’phone that crab-walkin’ Mistah Adam and tell him to get his fanny on back to his woman ’n’ chile!”

“Nobody knows where he is, Livia George. He’s moved out.”

For the rest of the day, my cook behaved like a woman infinitely sinned against, slamming pots and pans around and muttering. Once, she came out of the kitchen to glare at a red-haired man who’d returned his Continental Burger as oniony and overcooked.

“Overcooked?” she said, loud enough for the patron to hear. “’F I had me a pasty face like that fella’s, I wouldn’t eat nothin’ that wasn’t burnt to a crumbly char. He get a taste of underdone raw evver time he bite his bottom lip.”

Only by natural charm could I herd her back into the kitchen, and only by waiving his tab could I mollify the red-haired man she had insulted.

In my heart, though, I blamed the whole situation on Craig Puddicombe.

To forestall Craig’s using the Montarazes’ failure to comply with all his demands as an excuse to hurt their baby, Adam wrote this letter to the Atlanta newspapers:

The letter appeared in the Constitution on Thursday morning and in the Journal that afternoon. Adam had not let anyone read it beforehand, and although it technically fulfilled all the ransom demands not yet complied with, I was afraid its tone and turn of phrase might backfire on all of us. The letter seemed to embody the first extended use of irony and sarcasm that Adam had ever essayed.

Special Agent Hammond visited Paradise Farm shortly before midnight on Thursday. He told us that Niedrach had doubts similar to mine about the efficacy of Adam’s “Apology & Confession.” If Craig were in a touchy mood or if he thought Adam had played him false, T. P. might suffer the consequences. Or the letter might lead Craig to contact the Montarazes, thus multiplying the clues about his and Nancy’s whereabouts and inadvertently laying the groundwork for their capture.

Southern Bell Security had cooperated with the GBI in setting up a trap on my telephone by installing a pin register—a device capable of holding a line open even after the caller has hung up—in the office of the Beulah Fork exchange, but had not bothered to put a trap on the phones in the Montaraz house on Hurt Street because of Atlanta’s prohibitive number of exchanges. So I did not see how Hammond could say another call from Craig might prove his ruin. Besides, it was hard to imagine him calling Paradise Farm. He’d have to have a sudden prescient hunch about Adam’s hiding place.

“What in my letter could give offense?” Adam asked Hammond.

For someone able to grasp the metaphysical depths of various spiritual issues, Adam was curiously obtuse on this score. I told him his expression of regret felt tongue in cheek, his apology a clever indictment of Teavers, and his offer to give himself up a parody of genuine confession.

“You’ve complied with the letter but not the spirit of Craig’s demands.”

“How can I comply with the spirit of demands which I abhor?”

“You can’t,” Hammond said. “But you can pretend to.”

“I am no good at this pretending,” Adam growled. A tear formed in his eye. He blinked, and the tear slid moistly down the gully between his cheek and his habiline muzzle. “I can no longer make-believe I am happy apart from my wife. I can no longer make-believe my praying is helpful. I can no longer make-believe the God of Abraham and also of the converted Paul cares very much about my family’s dilemma.”

Hammond said, “We’re here, Mr. Montaraz, caring as much as we can.”

Seated at my dinette table with a bottle of Michelob, Adam broke down. He sobbed like an affronted toddler, his fragile lower face scrunching around alarmingly. I feared he was about to undo some aspect of the surgery that had “humanized” him.

“You should read the Book of Job,” Hammond said.

Adam shrugged aside the special agent’s hand. “Quiet the hell up!” he wheezed at Hammond. “My people have known two million years of trial, even to the need of hiding from our own descendants—but not even as free person in U.S. of America can I escape further tribulation. So I beg you most imploringly, ‘Quiet the hell up!’” He flung his beer bottle between Hammond and me at the fridge. By some miracle, it failed to break, but amber liquid sloshed everywhere, and the habiline got up and left the room.

“Touchy tonight,” said Hammond, not unsympathetically.

“Have you guys made any progress up there? What about Craig’s family here in town? Have you talked to them?”

“We haven’t talked to Puddicombe’s mother or any of his other family members because if we did, they’d try to tip him off. It’s that kind of family.”

“What’s Niedrach doing? And Davison? And their FBI liaison? Nothing’s happened since that letter came.” I was mopping spilled beer with paper towels.

Hammond tore two sheets of toweling from the roll and knelt next to the refrigerator to help. “They’re working. We’re all working. Sometimes you need a lucky break.” He carried the pieces of sopped toweling to the waste basket. “By the way, your friend Caroline Hanna told me to tell you hello. She’s over there with your ex-wife every moment she can spare away from her work—a friend indeed, that lady.”

God, I thought, they’re comparing notes. “Thanks. So what do we do now?”

“Sit tight, Mr. Loyd. Sit tight.”

Adam and RuthClaire had written the ten checks demanded by Craig’s letter for five thousand dollars each. Although these were big contributions by the standards of most American taxpayers, none by itself would seem remarkable coming from national figures of the Montarazes’ suspected wealth. The GBI agents had dissuaded them from writing any check for an amount conspicuously larger than the others for fear that Craig would use this disparity as an excuse to make further demands. He seemed to enjoy the game he was playing, as if the rush of making complex demands and having them carried out was a well-deserved bonus for his pursuit of “justice.”

By the end of the week, we learned, the Montarazes’ bank in DeKalb County began making payments on some of these drafts. STORC, the Klairvoyant Empire, the Rugged White Survivalists, the Methodist Children’s Home, and Aubrey O’Seamons had wasted little time cashing their checks. As a result, it might be possible to put all ten canceled checks in that display case in Lenox Square a few days ahead of schedule. Late Friday night, in fact, exactly one week after the kidnapping, Hammond informed Adam and me that the FBI had taken several discreet steps to have the checks in place by midweek. There was no sense delaying their availability to the kidnappers until the second Monday in August if they had already cleared. Whether Craig would let T. P. go before Monday was problematic, but we all agreed that it was worth a try. Meanwhile, video surveillance equipment had been concealed in front of Rich’s by specialists working in the mall after regular business hours.

Adam and RuthClaire traded letters during their separation. Bilker mailed them from random sites around the city, while I sent all of Adam’s billets-doux to Caroline Hanna’s apartment so she could carry them to Hurt Street when she visited RuthClaire. We took these precautions because Niedrach believed that Craig would interpret any sign of contact between the Montarazes, even from afar, as a violation of their promise to live apart. Phone calls were also out.

Caroline and I were under no such ban. So long as I placed my calls to her from the West Bank rather than Paradise Farm, no one objected to our talking to each other. Also, Caroline took pains to call me only at the restaurant. If she phoned during business hours, I clambered up to my sweltering second-floor storage room to take the call on the extension there. Downstairs, Livia George would hang up, and Caroline and I would jabber like furtive teenagers. The heat of the storage room, with its low musty cot and its listing pyramids of cardboard boxes and vegetable crates, heightened my sense of the illicitness of our hurried conversations. But I liked that feeling. It was absurd, feeling like a teen again, but it was splendid, too, an unexpected benefit of T. P.’s kidnapping that in full daylight I could in no way square with the horror of that event.

On Saturday night, Caroline called at 11:30, just as Hazel and Livia George were about to go out the front door. But with only an ancient rotating floor fan to keep me from collapsing of heat stroke, I took the call upstairs, anyway.

“Talk to me, kid.”

“Not for long, Paul. Listen: we’re hanging on, and Ruthie’s unbelievably self-possessed. Me, I’m done in.”

“Me, too. Frazzled. Big crowd tonight.”

“Adam?”

“I’ve begun to worry about him, Caroline. His odd amalgam of religious beliefs—his faith, if you want to call it that—seems to be deserting him. He walks around my place like Roderick Usher, morose and supersensitive. Know what he told me this morning? ‘I’m a lightning rod for human cruelty.’ His exact words.”

“That doesn’t sound like him. It’s self-pitying.”

“It is and it isn’t. I think he was expressing a degree of concern about the people around him. It bothers him that so many people—RuthClaire, me, Bilker, the cops and special agents, and you too, probably—are endangering themselves trying to help him. He feels responsible.”

“Well, he could just as easily say, ‘I’m a lightning rod for human charity.’ He’s looking at things backwards, Paul.”

“Is he any different from the rest of us? He takes the good for granted. Evil thoroughly confounds him.”

Caroline said, “Oh!” as if a 100-watt bulb had gone on over her head.

“What is it?” I asked her.

“Do you recall how Adam may’ve got to the States? How he was one of three habiline crew members on a fishing boat running guns from Punta Gorda in Cuba to the guerrilla opposition to Baby Doc in Haiti? Only that boat never made it back to Haiti. The Cuban I interviewed in the Atlanta Pen—Ignacio Guzman Suarez y Peña—well, Ignacio murdered the captain of that vessel and two of Adam’s fellow habilines. That’s another instance of violence that haunts Adam, another reason he keeps seeing himself as a ‘lightning rod for human cruelty.’ We keep forgetting he has a past antedating his first appearance in Georgia.”

I started to object, but Caroline cut me off:

“RuthClaire does, of course, but the rest of us have no strong sense of the hardships he’s already survived.”

“I love you, kid,” I said. Only the faint idiot singing of the wires—the roaring of the voiceless inane—still linked us. I shifted on the sagging cot, sweat lubricating my flanks. “You still there, Caroline?”

“You might have had the decency to tell me that last Saturday morning.”

“What’s wrong? Everything was okay yesterday, wasn’t it? Between us, I mean.”

She let the wires sing a few seconds. “Paul, I got a letter from Brian today.”

“Nollinger?” My heart sank.

The very one, she admitted. The letter had come from a city called Montecristi in a northeastern province of the Dominican Republic. In it, good old Brian spent several paragraphs justifying his abrupt departure from Atlanta. His position in the anthropology department at Emory had steadily deteriorated. His well-publicized quarrel with the Zarakali paleoanthropologist Alistair P. Blair had put him on mushy ground with his colleagues, most of whom revered the cantankerous old fart. Nor had Brian improved their opinion of him by accusing the artist RuthClaire Loyd of making Adam Montaraz, the habiline refugee from the Caribbean, her personal “slave,” when, in fact, the two had freely married each other. Unleashing an agent of the INS on Adam had been yet another regrettable mistake.

“He made plenty of ’em. Glad to know he’s begun to regret them.” Caroline shushed me. Gradually among Brian’s colleagues, she continued, paraphrasing the letter, there had grown a perception that he was trying to milk the habiline controversy of every last drop of career benefit. (And ineptly missing the pail.) He had further compounded his problems in the department by belatedly developing scruples about some experiments, with primates, at the field station north of Atlanta. Did these experiments serve any essential research purpose, or were they only a convenient means of generating grant money for ethologists who might otherwise lack employment? At last, chagrined by his own complicity in this system, he had made loud noises about the inhumanity of his long study with stub-tailed macaques. Never again would he exploit innocent primates for research purposes, no matter how noble the cause. Colleagues with funded experiments of their own had interpreted Brian’s newfound scrupulosity as a holier-than-thou slap in the face. His reputation as a limelight-seeking cad had grown into a behemoth.

“He deserved that reputation.”

“Maybe. He says that since last summer he’s been a waking nightmare. He says if it hadn’t been for my affection and support, he would’ve overdosed on sleeping tablets by Christmas.”

“That’s touching. Considering the debt he feels he owed you, why do you suppose he never bothered to tell you goodbye?”

“He apologizes for that. He feared if he came to say goodbye, he’d chicken out and stay. When he learned he’d landed a research position with an American concern in the Dominican Republic, he didn’t know whether to cheer or what. It was such a drastic break with his own past: a Georgia boy with advanced degrees in anthropology and primate behavior. He turned his back on all that. He didn’t know if he could do it, Paul.”

“It looks like he managed.”

“Relax, will you? I’m not buying an airline ticket to the Dominican. I don’t love Brian. I’m just relieved to know he’s okay.”

I did relax. She no longer loved the man. Why, then, had she been so tentative about telling me he’d written? Well, my attitude toward him precluded comfortable talk about her former lover. She’d been afraid to mention Brian’s name, much less tell me about his letter. Also, she’d felt that to hold back word of the letter would be to sabotage whatever degree of trust we had so far created between us.

“What the hell’s he doing down there, anyway?” I blurted.

“He’s a sugar-industry hire.” I heard Caroline shuffling the pages of Brian’s letter as I’d once heard Puddicombe uncreasing his list of ransom demands. “The plantations on which he’s to work are owned by the Austin-Antilles Corporation. They’ve asked him to look into the conditions of Haitian canecutters. The canecutters are hired on a lottery basis by the local sugar-harvesting network. Brian’s supposed to propose cost-efficient ways of improving their lot—without destroying the economic base of the Haitian or the Dominican government.”

“Cripes. “

“What? Brian says he’s already begun spotlighting the squalid conditions of the canecutters. He’s excited. He thinks finding a way to channel some of Austin-Antilles Corporation’s money to these folks will be a challenge. He’s using his anthropological background for a humane sociological purpose.”

“Caroline, it’s a shortcut to crucifixion.”

“Why?”

“Don’t kid me. You’re the one who’s worked with Cuban and Haitian refugees.”

“Not down there. Only here. What’re you getting at?”

“Haitian politics are nasty. Dominican democracy is fragile, and Austin-Antilles is a multinational conglomerate that’s never shared the wealth with peons. The reverse, in fact. From what little I know, it sounds to me as if your friend Brian is getting caught in the middle of a canecutting public-relations ploy. Haitian workers always get the shitty end of the stick.”

“Brian thinks he may be able to do some good.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t end up with nails in his feet and palms.”

Caroline chuckled mordantly. “That’s the first time you’ve wished him anything less fatal than hanging at dawn, isn’t it?”

Probably, I admitted. I also told Caroline that if Brian did his job too well, and if Austin-Antilles did not fire him for his presumption, he’d surely be transferred to a less controversial company enterprise elsewhere. That was how the Big AAC did business.

For a moment, inarticulate arias of static. Then my caller said, “I love you, too,” and hung up. I sat there in the heat, stunned, savoring her words.

At Paradise Farm, Adam was vegetating. If he wrote RuthClaire a letter, he forgot to give it to me to mail. If he started a crossword puzzle, he soon lost interest. His books on theology, religious history, the philosophy of religion, and contemporary creation theory sat untouched in their boxes in the second-floor studio. Neil Hammond did not come by with news, and on Sunday morning, too wrought up by Caroline’s declaration of love to sleep late, I was the one who turned on Great Gospel Giveaway.

Maybe I had a hunch that McElroy would mention a recent $5,000 contribution from Adam Montaraz. Bingo. He acknowledged it just as an army of cleancut ushers began filing toward the altar to pick up the collection plates. Adam, too busy trying to think of a nine-letter word for “false piety” to glance at the set, made no sign he’d heard McElroy acknowledge the donation.

That afternoon, however, he fell asleep while watching a Braves game on Channel 17. I turned off the set without rousing him, a notable achievement because he usually slept as lightly as a cat. McElroy’s sermon had been called “Energizing Commitments,” and that was what Adam seemed to need. Unfortunately, he had not listened to the man.

On Monday about 10 A.M., I drove into town and stopped first at the Greyhound Depot Laundry to pick up my tablecloths. Ben Sadler, already looking rumpled and dehydrated, had them waiting on the counter. The black woman who operated his steam press—a forbidding-looking instrument with a lid like a coffin’s—also made a point of marking my entrance. Uh oh, I thought. What’s going on?

My subsequent talk with Ben was curiously aimless, focusing on such weighty topics as the humidity level and hog-market prices. Strange. Ben usually liked to provoke a verbal scrap over the deployment of U.S. forces in Central America or the morality of alcoholic-beverage licenses for local eating establishments. I started to leave.

“Say,” said Ben, “do you take Newsweek?”

“I don’t subscribe. Occasionally, I’ll buy a copy. Why?”

“Have you seen this week’s issue?”

“Is it out already?”

“Hy Langton, over at the drugstore, gets his copies first thing Monday mornin’. I bought one right off. He don’t know what to do with the rest of ’em, though—put ’em out for sale or stash ’em down under the register.”

“Newsweek? With the Playboys and Penthouses?”

“It’s a eye-opener, the new one. Milly and me—” nodding at the steam-press operator, who looked down in acute embarrassment— “we’ve been discussin’ how much times’ve changed, to let a magazine like ol’ Newsweek use the kinda cover it’s just used. Is it still safe to send your kids down a small-town sidewalk ’thout a blindfold?”

“But you bought a copy?”

“I got it for you, Paul.” Even in the morning heat and the heat of the laundry, Ben managed to blush. “Don’t be insulted. It’s not that I think you’re a creep or somethin’. It’s just that, you know, once bein’ married to an artist and all, you’re more sophisticated than most folks in Beulah Fork. You know how to take such stuff ’thout bein’ prurient about it. Isn’t that the word, prurient?”

“For God’s sake, Ben, what are you talking about?”

“Here.” With one emphatic motion, he produced the magazine from beneath his counter and plonked it down on the folded tablecloths. The magazine’s cover slapped me hard, but I kept my face as noncommittal as I could. Let Ben and Milly invent a reaction rather than simply relate it. The gossip mills would grind no matter what I did.

And the cover on the new Newsweek?

Well, it consisted of a photograph of Adam and RuthClaire standing side by side, frontally nude, Adam to the left, RuthClaire to the right. Adam had his hand raised in a venerable human gesture signifying “Peace” or “I have no weapon.” My ex-wife, although visible frontally from head to toe, was standing with her left leg slightly extended and her body canted a little bit toward Adam’s. Eye-catching as they were, the couple occupied only the vertical right half of the cover.

The other half contained a pair of clocks side by side beneath the second three letters of the Newsweek logo. One clock had the initials B.C. in its center, the other the abbreviation A.D. In shadow under the clocks hung a clear Plexiglas model of the African continent, while at the bottom of the photo, going from left to right beneath the suspended continent and the primeval couple, floated a string of islands representing the Greater and Lesser Antilles. From the island Hispaniola shot out a sequence of arrows demarcating the wake of a fishing boat on its way past Cuba to the tip of Florida. A legend superimposed beneath the feet of Adam and RuthClaire proclaimed:

“Bet this gets a lot of bluenoses to cancel subscriptions,” Ben said.

I didn’t reply, but Ben was probably right. Whoever had taken this photograph had not bothered to air-brush the pubic hair or private parts of my ex and her husband. That was why I thought I knew the photographer’s identity. I flipped to the cover story at the magazine’s heart. Scanning its lead and several paragraphs, I found the name Maria-Katherine Kander repeatedly. In fact, two of the photos accompanying the article were fairly tame portraits—i.e., the models either in shadow or semimodestly draped—from the Abraxas show that had featured Adam’s paintings and the colorful work of various Haitian artists. I had stepped into a timewarp flinging me back to February.

“Did you know they’d done this, Paul? Had their pictures taken nude?”

“No. No, I didn’t.”

It was hard to imagine RuthClaire consenting to such a portrait. She was as naked in this Newsweek cover as I’d ever seen her. Midway through our marriage, she had made up her mind that regular intercourse with me had about it the irresistible romance of changing a flat on a ’54 Chevy jalopy. It was not that she was puritanical or cold, but that for her sex had become a time-consuming process best left to people with nothing more important to do. Her sense that I would probably never father her child had reinforced this cavalier attitude in her. If procreation was out, and pleasure had fled, why bother? At any rate, the last time I’d seen her unclad was the night I’d climbed into a magnolia tree on Paradise Farm to take pictures of Adam in the downstairs bathroom. She had been infinitely more provocative in that setting. In the Kander photo, she seemed to represent Womankind for an alien eye that might not otherwise grasp the concept.

In a way, of course, that was exactly the point.

I set the magazine atop the tablecloths and gathered it and them up in my arms. “Thanks for the Newsweek, Ben.” I staggered across the street with this load, dumped the tablecloths into a chair, and told Livia George that, once again, she’d have to handle the luncheon crowd without me. She waved a hand in dismissal. Nothing I did or failed to do surprised her anymore. So, rolled-up Newsweek in hand, I exited the West Bank and climbed into my car.

Neil Hammond’s jacked-up purple pickup sat in front of my house at Paradise Farm. Hammond was in the living room with a stack of Newsweeks balanced on one of my more fragile-looking end tables holding the magazines in place with the heel of his hand. Adam perched on a wingback across from him, looking penitent and befuddled. My own copy was clutched in my fist like a billy club.

“You’ve seen it,” Hammond said. “You’ve seen the day’s major disaster.” He gestured at the magazines. “I saw it about an hour ago, when I went to the drugstore to buy my wife an anniversary card. I bought every Newsweek in the damn place. Mr. Langton thinks I’m a world-class pervert. It’s probably blown my cover.” He shook his head. “My cover blown by a magazine cover. Funny, huh? I went to every corner of town buying the damn things up, but the damage has already been done. People here remember Mrs. Montaraz—they remember her well—and a lot of magazines that went out on the racks were grabbed for souvenirs. Tomorrow, the folks who have subscription copies’ll get theirs. There’s no way to put a lid on this. It’s a public-relations disaster, a blow to all we’ve been trying to do in this case.” He lifted his hand from the magazines, which slid to the floor in a cascade of whispery thumps.

Adam and RuthClaire, Adam and RuthClaire, Adam and RuthClaire.

I looked at Adam. “What the hell did you two think you were doing?”

“They’ve contributed to what’s likely to become its most collectible issue—cover intact, of course—of Newsweek magazine, ever,” Hammond said, nudging the pile with his boot. “That’s one thing they’ve done. Newsweek’ll get more letters than they’ve ever received, and nine tenths will be from outraged old ladies, concerned mothers, angry preachers, and so on. Subscriptions’ll get canceled, sure, but every damn newsstand copy will be gone before dinnertime.

“Do you remember how that flaky Beatle and his Japanese old lady made an album called Two Virgins in the late sixties? They had themselves shot buck-naked for the album cover. Nobody at their damn company wanted to use the photographs, but the flaky Beatle insisted. They sold the damn things in brown envelopes, though. This—” he kicked one of the fallen magazines—“is being sold right out in front of God and everybody with Time and Woman’s Day and Field & Stream. And by ‘God and everybody,’ I do mean everybody: Little Bobby, Innocent Little Susy, Sweet Old Aunt Matilda, and, probably worst of all, Crazy Craig Puddicombe.”

Adam, hands clasped between his knees, looked up. “Neither RuthClaire nor I had any inkling this shot would appear—” gesturing vaguely— “as it so upsettingly has.”

“But why’d you pose for something like this?” I asked.

“In April, Mister Paul, long before my surgery, this M.-K. Kander person came to Atlanta on business at Abraxas. About ‘shooting’ RuthClaire and me, she inquired. The idea of the Primeval Couple had great appeal to her. Mister David did introductions. And Miss RuthClaire and this M.-K. Kander person, they took to each other fast. So when her new friend suggests we pose as you see, my wife has no great objection. Nor I. So our photo got taken in gallery room where Ms. Kander had February show. Later, she kindly sends us prints of very same one Newsweek has given horrible honor of its cover.” Adam sought my eyes. “Never did we expect this picture to appear anywhere but in M.-K. Kander private portfolio. This, then, is great shock.”

“It’s a disaster,” Hammond reiterated.

I opened out my scrolled copy and held it up. “But why like this, Adam? Why did she want you to pose like this?”

His growl tentative, Adam said, “The set-up was greatly symbolic. The Primeval Couple, as I have said. My name is Adam, and I am a habiline with origins going deeply past those of even Biblical Adam. So said Maria-Katherine. Miss RuthClaire, to the contrary, is modern woman with life in technological times. So, again, said M.-K. Kander. Our union, she told us, ties up past and future of species in exciting new Now.” He paused. “Maybe this symbolism lacks clarity, but in standing naked beside my wife, I saw no harm for this talented picture-taking person. Early Adam and somewhat later Eve. Miss RuthClaire thought it—you may be surprised—very funny and also enjoyable.”

“This pose reminds me of something, Adam,” I said. “But what?”

“Maria-Katherine patterned her shot after the plaques sent out into cosmos aboard Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft. They feature naked male and female side by side, the man with his right hand raised. On those plaques, male is taller than female, and islands at bottom are not Cuba and so on, but the sun and planets of our solar system. A miniature of the spacecraft is leaving third such body and flying off between Jupiter and Saturn into cosmic ocean. Again, it was Kander person’s idea to use this pattern. A Plexiglas model of Africa hangs to right because our kind, it seems, did begin there. Miss Maria-Katherine made this continent artifact herself.”

Hammond twisted his cap in his hands. “You had no idea this photograph would show up as a Newsweek cover?”

“They would have,” I said, “if the cover story had been about them. The editorial staff would have said so. But this issue’s cover story is about the new photography, and the only release the editors probably needed was from M.-K. Kander.”

“If we’d known they were going to use it,” Hammond said, “we would have told them what was going on down here. We’d’ve asked them to deep-six the damn thing or at least delay it another week. There’s nothing that topical about ‘The New Photography,’ for God’s sake. They could have waited.”

Adam stood, thrust his hands deep into his slacks pockets, and, balancing on one leg, picked up a copy of Newsweek with the toes of his other foot. The magazine dangled there like a startled sea creature yanked from its natural element. And then Adam disdainfully dropped it.

“I am very unhappy with Miss M.-K.,” he said, “very unhappy, indeed.”

I returned to work. Hammond remained at the house with Adam. At six o’clock that evening, the agent telephoned the West Bank to tell me that something had happened and that he and Adam must leave for Atlanta.

“Wait a minute. I want to go with you.”

Livia George, at my elbow beside the cash register, said, “This got somethin’ to do with Miss RuthClaire gettin’ jaybird-skinny for that cover?”

“Hush, Livia George.”

“City did this to ’em. City made ’em think they could shuck their clothes for some hotsy-totsy nashunal magazine.”

“Damn it, get out of my ear for a minute!” I muffled the telephone’s mouthpiece. A couple at a nearby table peeked up at me, disapprovingly.

Hammond’s voice said, “This isn’t your affair any longer, Mr. Loyd. Niedrach’s just called. We’ve got to go.”

“T. P.’s my godson. Give me ten minutes and I’ll be there with you.”

“We’re leaving.”

“I’ll follow.”

“That’s your prerogative.”

“The Montaraz house on Hurt Street?”

“Goodbye, Mr. Loyd.”

“What happened? Did Craig call? Did someone see him?”

But all I had in my ear was a busy signal. I barged into the kitchen and found Livia sullenly slicing tomatoes into a salad. Hazel Upchurch was sautéing mushrooms in a cast-iron skillet. Debbie Rae House, my new waitress, was watching them, bored.

“Pray,” I commanded. “I don’t know what the hell good it’ll do, but pray. Pray for T. P.” Then I was gone.

Despite their head start, I caught up with Hammond’s pickup between the two exits sandwiching Newnan, Georgia, on I-85. The sun was lowering itself rung by rung to the western horizon, but daylight still lingered above the heat-browned meadows flanking the interstate, and traffic was brisk in both directions. Doing eighty, I had to hit my brakes to keep from overshooting the agent’s truck, and my own car almost got away from me before I brought it under control and followed Hammond and his habiline passenger into Atlanta without further incident. We parked across the street from the Montaraz house and went inside.

Adam and RuthClaire embraced.

Niedrach was present, Davison was not. In the latter’s place were two men in sports jackets and spiffily creased slacks. Neither of these men had yet hit his fortieth birthday. One had stylishly long hair that just touched his collar in back but stayed well off his ears. He was pink-cheeked and clear-eyed, after the fashion of a second lead in a B movie of the 1940s. The other man had an astronaut’s conservative haircut, a nose that had once been broken, and a shovel-shaped mouth that sometimes seemed to move as if it had a will distinct from its owner’s. Feds, these fellows. Latter-day heirs of the late, unlamented J. Edgar Hoover.

Bilker Moody introduced these men as Investigator Tim Le May (the B-movie second lead) and Investigator Erik Webb (the shovel-mouthed astronaut). They had taken over the case on the Saturday afternoon following the kidnapping, but Niedrach had stayed on to coordinate their investigation with local police departments and the antiterrorist unit of the GBI. Given federal jurisdiction over most kidnappings, this was a somewhat unusual arrangement, but Niedrach’s familiarity with Klan tactics and his knowledge of events precipitated last summer by the Kudzu Klavern had argued tellingly for his uninterrupted involvement with this case. I was glad to see him. He wore his bulldog belt buckle and a navy-blue windbreaker that made him seem out of uniform. He looked like the fatigued, seedy uncle of the younger, more dapper FBI agents.

Adam approached him. “What has happened?”

“The bastard phoned,” Bilker Moody said, his upper arms straining the sleeve bands of his sweaty Banlon shirt.

“We’ve got a tape,” Le May said. “Come into the kitchen and we’ll play it.”

We filed into the kitchen. The tape machine, with two sets of headphones, was connected to the wall phone beside the door leading to Bilker’s pantry headquarters. Still, you could sit at the kitchen table while listening to or taping a call, and Adam and RuthClaire sat down there with Niedrach, Le May, and Webb. Hammond, Moody, and I found corners into which to wedge ourselves, and Le May turned a dial on the antique-looking recorder. Its milky reels began to turn, but at first all we could hear was the low hum of the refrigerator. Then Craig Puddicombe’s voice said, “A whore and her hibber. For all the world to see.”

“Where’s Paulie?” RuthClaire’s voice asked. “Tell me how he is, Craig.”

“ ’S good’s can be expected, considerin’ what and where he came from.”

“We’re living apart, Adam and I. We’ve lived apart for nearly ten days now. You know that, don’t you?”

“No, ma’am. You’re standin’ right next to each other for all the fuckin’ world to see. That’s what you’re doing.”

“We had no idea that—”

“That you had your goddamn clothes off? Interestin’ defense, ma’am. Interestin’ goddamn defense.”

“That the photo would show up as a magazine cover.”

“Course you didn’t. And the spade who raped a troop of Girl Scouts said, ‘Sorry, angry white folks. I had no ideah I was gonna get caught. No ideah at all.’”

On the tape, RuthClaire began to cry. “What do you want me to do? The photo’s history. Adam and I can’t undo it. So what do you want from us now?”

“Who said I wanted anything, Missus Hibber Whore?”

“Then why have you called? Tell me about Paulie.”

“You’ve surprised the whole damn country, haven’t you? Well, everybody deserves as good as they give, don’t they? A big surprise all their own.”

“What surprise, Craig?”

Puddicombe was silent a moment. Then he blurted, “But I do want something. I want you and your hibber to get back together. Now. Today. This very evenin’.”

“Craig—”

He broke the connection. On tape, RuthClaire’s voice hurried to ask, “Was that long enough to do any good? Was that—”

Le May turned off the recorder. “Telephone technology’s changing every day. If an exchange office has a computerized system, you don’t have to rely on taps and pin registers to trace calls. The computer will print out the number for you, then search its memory and identify the owner. This time we got lucky. The number Puddicombe called from belongs to a newly computerized exchange. We asked at all such offices and found an exchange with a recent call to this house. The time’s matched up exactly.”

“He phoned from College Park,” Webb said. “Not far from Hartsfield International.”

“Then you can catch him,” I said. “You can send people down there to stake out the place and grab him.”

Niedrach said, “If he were a complete dolt. But he isn’t. The number belongs to a pay phone in a public booth off Virginia Avenue. The College Park police checked it out, but Puddicombe hadn’t hung around long enough to say hello to them.”

“Then what the hell good does knowing where he called from do us?” I asked. “He’s gone, and we don’t know where.”

Investigator Webb, the agent with the Gus Grissom haircut, said, “We know he’s in Greater Atlanta. And we’ve got people in College Park asking questions of all the folks who might’ve seen Puddicombe using the booth. It’s on a sidewalk by a fast-food place, and the call came at a busy time in the afternoon. There’s a lead or two, Mr. Loyd. We expect something to break tonight.”

“And just what is it you expect to break?”

My question elicited embarrassed silence for an answer. No one in the Montaraz kitchen knew what to expect. Despite his Klan activities in Hothlepoya County, Craig was mostly an unknown quantity to these officers. The unpredictability of his behavior—the virulence of his racial and sexual hangups—could not fail to disturb us. My anxiety level was steadily mounting. That much I knew, but not a lot more.

Taking pedantic care with his phrasing, Le May said, “Seeing first that the perpetrator is still out there and, second, that his whereabouts aren’t fully pinpointed, we thought it best to have the Montarazes obey his last demand.”

“The bozo’s gettin’ ready to do something,” Bilker Moody said. “He’s just gettin’ everybody in place so the show can start. He likes theatrics, this guy does.”

“A surprise,” Niedrach said speculatively. “A surprise.”

Niedrach, Hammond, and Le May left the house to continue their investigative work elsewhere. Webb stayed to monitor the telephone and the recorder to which it was wired. Bilker and Adam went into the studio to play several tension-defusing games of Ping-Pong. Even in the kitchen, I heard the racket they made grunting, trading slams, and throwing their bodies across the table to return drop shots just over the net. RuthClaire, who might have been expected to want some time alone with Adam, approved their play. Just the simple act of spectating seemed to calm her nerves.

I stayed in the kitchen with Webb—Ping-Pong is not my game—and asked him what leads they had.

His mouth began to move even before any words came out. “Woman working at the fast-food place next to the phone booth. This gal says she saw a guy in a painter’s white coveralls go past the front window about the time our call was made. Bearded fellow. Young. She remembers because her boss had talked about repainting the divider lines in the parking lot. She wondered if the guy was there to do that. He must not’ve been, though, because there was only that one time he went by and the divider lines in the parking lot still haven’t been repainted.”

“You think Craig’s wearing a painter’s coveralls?”

“Her description of the fella sounds like Puddicombe.”

“Did your witness happen to see what he was driving?”

“Her position behind the counter didn’t let her, no.”

“That’s one helluva lead. If he keeps his coveralls on and walks around the city everywhere he goes, you’ll nab him before the year’s out.”

Webb smiled. “Touché.” His FBI affiliation had not gone to his head. Provincial rather than Prussian in his slacks-and-sports-jacket uniform, he had no trouble admitting that this investigation had him groping down one blind alley after another. His easy-going agreeability irritated me.

So I wandered down the hall to Bilker’s pantry headquarters.

If Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd.

A comforting thought. I entered the pantry and sat in front of the TV monitors on the plywood counter. Why hadn’t the FBI set up in here? Well, Bilker had denied them access. The pantry belonged to him, and he was responsible for security, just as they were for the investigation of Paulie’s kidnapping. One of Bilker’s screens, I noticed, featured a continuous panoramic display of Hurt Street, while another had its eye on the well-lit MARTA station on DeKalb Avenue.

“Comfy, fella?”

I looked over my shoulder. It was Bilker, his T-shirt three different shades of dark green and his face as red and shiny as a candy apple. His expression was malevolent. I hoped that he remembered Adam’s good opinion of me.

The TV monitor came to my rescue. “Look.” I pointed. “Somebody’s coming.”

In fact, two cars were pulling up in front of the house: a late-model Plymouth glinting indigo in the actinic glare of the MARTA lamps and, right behind it, a blue VW beetle of older vintage. Caroline Hanna climbed gingerly out of the Volkswagen; then, as if they had taken a moment to settle a minor disagreement, Le May and Niedrach hatched from opposite doors of the Plymouth. All three people started up the walk to the house together, and another monitor picked them up.

“Whyn’t you go greet your sweetie ’fore I yank this here chair out from under your tail?”

“That’s a good idea.”

Only by coincidence had Caroline and the agents arrived at the same time. She was surprised to see me, even more surprised to see Adam. She had come to provide RuthClaire with female companionship for the rest of the evening. But face to face with me again, Caroline was shy. She hoped to let her entire greeting consist of a friendly pat on my arm, but I pulled her to me and brushed her forehead with my lips. Niedrach interrupted to say that he and Le May had to talk to me in private, and Adam led Caroline into the studio.

“What is it?” I asked the investigators.

“We want you to come with us,” Le May said.

“Where? What for?”

Adam returned as if to eavesdrop on the rest of our talk. Le May hesitated, afraid to proceed in front of the habiline, and my stomach clenched.

“You must tell me, too,” Adam said. “I am deserving to hear.”

Niedrach nodded. “We want to see if Mr. Loyd can make an identification for us.”

“What kind of identification?” I asked.

“Take a ride with us,” Niedrach said. “We’ll show you.”

“I am going, too,” Adam declared.

Le May started to protest, but Niedrach shook his head. So, after telling the others we’d be back shortly, the four of us went out into the muggy summer evening under smog-blurred stars and got into the FBI agent’s Plymouth. A mosquito was trapped in the back seat with Adam and me, and we listened to its faint but annoying whine until the habiline jerked his head and snapped his mouth shut on the insect. He settled back into his seat. Helplessly, I stared at him.

“Forgive me, Mister Paul. I am edgy this night.”

Le May spoke into a hand-held mike from under the dash. “We’re on our way.”

Static answered.

At the bottom of Hurt Street, Le May turned right on Waverly, part of a historic enclave dense with trees and Victorian houses in various stages of decay or renovation. From Waverly, we wound onto the southwest-to-northeast diagonal of Euclid Avenue, eventually creeping uphill past a row of shops to the brightness of Little Five Points. We crossed Moreland and dipped away from the bustle of the Points into a neighborhood of shabby clapboard bungalows and red-brick apartment buildings from the 1940s. I had no idea where we were going, but Adam seemed to.

“The Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center?” he asked.

“That’s right,” Niedrach replied. “How did you know?”

“Here, for many Sundays and a few troubled weekdays, Miss RuthClaire and I took our church before my surgery. I liked it. It had no rigid doctrines and welcomed anyone who had a spiritual hungriness.”

Presently, then, Le May let the Plymouth coast to rest behind a Fulton County police car and an ambulance parked beside the Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center. A host of people stood on the narrow front lawn. The blue-and-white flasher on the squad car picked these people out of the darkness, again and again. The door to the Meditation Center—once, I could tell, a single-story brick house like many other houses here—stood open. The stained-glass fanlight above the door was illuminated from behind by a cruel electric glare. Obviously, the police had been here a while.

Niedrach told Adam and me that when we entered the building, we would see just what the Meditation Center director, Ryan Bynum, had found upon entering its sanctuary at 8:47 P.M. for a routine check of the premises. The policemen working this crime had restored the scene to the physical conditions that had greeted Bynum.

Le May had already threaded his way through some of the teen-age gawkers on the lawn. He beckoned us after. Adam and I reluctantly obeyed. One of the young people, recognizing Adam, came forward with a copy of Newsweek and asked him to autograph its cover. Strutting uncertainly, the kid looked scarcely more than fourteen.

“You’re impeding a murder investigation,” Niedrach told him.

“Four letters,” the kid snarled. “Just his goddamn first name.”

Distractedly, Adam signed the magazine, printing ADAM beneath the image of his naked feet. The kid grumbled thanks and moved back into the crowd loitering nearby.

“He’s going to sell it to a speculator for two hundred or so bucks,” Niedrach said.

Adam shrugged.

In the church’s foyer, a man with a gold teardrop in his left ear lobe hugged Adam possessively. Tall but graceful, he had to stoop to do so. I knew without being introduced that this was Ryan Bynum, the Center’s director.

“Good to see you again, Adam,” Bynum said. “You’ve been away too long.”

Adam said, “I am not here to rejoin, but—”

“You can talk! My God, it’s a miracle, Adam!”

“—to accompany Mister Paul. These agents think he may be able to identify the victim.”

Bynum was beside himself over Adam’s ability to speak, but, upon receiving a condensed version of the events that had brought it about, began to discuss tonight’s untoward happenings: “Some churches get firebombed. Some get defaced with graffiti. But ours draws a more creative, more neurotic, kind of vandal.” Bynum was sidling along the foyer wall so that we could squeeze past him into the living-room-sized sanctuary. “Whoever did it, well, he ought to be a member. He needs us. If not us, then serious, serious therapy.”

The sanctuary, or main meditation room, was brightly lit—a departure from the way Bynum had found it only an hour ago, a departure from the aqueous gloom into which members had to tiptoe when they wanted to meditate or commune. Because of the lights, we could look across the sanctuary to the dais under a huge bronze mandala and see exactly what Niedrach and Le May wanted us to see, namely, the murder victim, who reposed in a leather lounger that someone had wrestled onto the dais so that it sat there like a laid-back throne.

Adam and I exchanged puzzled looks because a shaggy, orangish-red orangutan sprawled in the lounger. The creature wore a set of headphones, but its posture betrayed its lifelessness. Upside-down in its lap was a naked plastic doll: a black baby doll for a black child. It had fallen across the orangutan’s lap so that its head was wedged between one shaggy thigh and the lounger’s leather armrest.

“It’s a costume,” Niedrach said. “Mr. Bynum found the victim this way. The head comes off.” He wove his way through rows of loungers and divans to the dais. There, gripping the orangutan head at the neck, he turned it—as if trying to unscrew a diving helmet from a diving suit. A moment later, he lifted the head clear and gestured at the startling human visage protruding from the costume’s neck hole.

It was Nancy Teavers. Her head shone like a large mottled egg. Either she or Craig had shaved off every lock of her hair. The spiky white coiffure she had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances had been a wig. Whatever the case then, tonight she was bald. Her eyes bulged. Bruises discolored her cheeks. Her lips were bloated. I still recognized her as the unhappy waitress who had decided to go west to make her fortune. Instead, she had gone to Craig Puddicombe, and Craig had turned her into a punkette, a babysitter for the kidnapped T. P., and an orangutan. What did this grotesque progression mean? Perhaps a bizarre homicidal performance-art parody of Darwinism and evolutionary theory.

“Do you remember his first call?” I asked Niedrach. “He claimed he didn’t do violence.”

“We all knew he was lying… to himself as much as to us.”

Adam, who’d gone forward, started to pick the doll out of the victim’s orangutan lap, but Le May caught his wrist. A Fulton County detective, he said, would have to bag the doll for forensic analysis. Fingerprints, Mr. Montaraz, fingerprints.

“It proves our Paulie is dead,” Adam said. “That’s the doll’s terrible meaning.”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“That’s right,” Ryan Bynum said. “How could it mean that? You don’t believe in voodoo, do you?” Ignorant of the kidnapping, Bynum had jumped to the conclusion that Adam was surrendering to an atavistic Carib superstition.

My unofficial identification made, the Fulton County detectives shooed us out so they could finish their work. As we stood on the lawn, two men with a stretcher entered the building and reappeared a few moments later carrying the costumed Nancy. The ambulance at curbside took her in and departed with her without benefit of siren or flasher. After all, what was the hurry?

“It looks as if she was strangled,” Le May told us. “But it didn’t happen here. The only sign of struggle has to do with rearranging furniture. No breaking and entering, either. Puddicombe used somebody’s membership card, opened the back door from the inside, and dragged Nancy in from the rear drive.”

“I am so sorry for her,” Adam said.

We left the site in Le May’s Plymouth, and Niedrach told us that shortly before noon, just three or four hours after most newsstands and drugstores had begun selling the latest Newsweek, Craig had rented the orangutan suit from Atlanta Costume Company. A clerk there had given detectives a good description of the renter. Bearded. Young. Blue-eyed. He hadn’t been wearing painter’s coveralls, though, but toast-colored, pleated pants and a white T-shirt that had left his midriff bare.

He had claimed to be a student at Georgia Tech, wanting the costume for some kind of fraternity prank. He had paid a deposit in cash—rather than with a check and the supporting evidence of a student ID, but the address he had given as his parents’ seemed more than peculiar in retrospect: it was Adam and RuthClaire’s address on Hurt Street. His name he had given as Greg Burdette, and for that he had shown a current driver’s license with a photo of his own likeness. He had struck the clerk as an oddly somber type to be renting an orangutan costume, but she had rationalized this anomaly of bearing as an attempt to complete the rental with a deadpan savoir-faire. In fact, once he had left the front counter, she had burst out laughing at his successful act.

“Did she see what he was driving?” (My obsessive concern.)

“Unfortunately, no,” Niedrach confessed.

Adam said, “No one here should tell Miss RuthClaire what we saw at Meditation Center. Already, she has enough to cope with.”

I looked at Adam. I had no doubt that in his mind’s eye was a picture of that black doll upside-down in Nancy Teavers’s lap.

But back at the house, RuthClaire got the truth from Adam in five minutes. He could not lie to her, and she would not be put off with stalling tactics or verbal evasions.

“You didn’t think I could handle the news, is that it?”

“I wanted only to—”

“To keep it from me. That’s sweet. But I’m not a little girl. I’m an adult.”

Small and forlorn, Adam stood in shadow with his back to the beaverboard panel in the downstairs studio, his profile at once heroic and prehistorically feral.

“Nancy dead, strangled, dressed in a monkey suit, put on display in Ryan Bynum’s Meditation Center. But why? To horrify us? To put us on notice?” RuthClaire paced among her canvases.

“A puke-livered terror tactic,” Bilker said from the far side of the big room.

“Paulie’s dead already,” RuthClaire told us, ignoring the security guard. “Or else Craig plans to kill him this evening. We’ll find the body tomorrow.”

“That’s a defeatist look at the situation, ma’am,” Le May said.

“You think I like it? I don’t. It makes my heart swell up and my rib cage ache.”

“Mine, too,” Adam said—so simply that I was moved for both of them.

“It’s the waiting that’s killing me,” RuthClaire said. “Craig’s told us what he’s going to do, and we’re still waiting. We frail females—” putting her hand to her brow like Scarlett O’Hara—“are supposed to be able to bide our time, but how you go-git-’em macho fellas can take it is beyond me.”

“This such fella takes it very badly,” Adam said.

RuthClaire went to him, and they embraced. Then she turned to Caroline. “Come upstairs, Caroline. I want to lie down, but it would be nice to have somebody to talk to.”

The two women left. I sipped at a Scotch on the rocks that Bilker had made for me. I felt a hand on my arm. It belonged to Adam. Its grip on my biceps tightened inexorably. “You’ve had enough, Mister Paul.”

“I haven’t even had one. Sit down. Bilker’ll fix you right up.”

“Abraxas,” Adam said.

“What?”

“We should go to Abraxas. I, Mister Paul, am going there. Please come with me. It is what needs to be done.”

“What’s going on at Abraxas? Aren’t they closed on Mondays, like the High and most independent galleries? Besides, they’d all be closed by now.”

Adam said, “Nancy Teavers dead in Ryan Bynum’s church is a red flag waving. Interpret the signal. Where might Mr. Puddicombe next appear?”

“Abraxas?”

Bilker Moody had his hands in a stainless-steel basin full of suds and highball glasses. “Hell, yes,” he said. “Hell, yes!”

Niedrach and Le May were no longer with us. Back in the kitchen with Webb? Probably. “Tell Niedrach and the FBI men,” I urged Adam.

“I don’t think so. They are worthy gentlemen. I like them very much. But none of them has read the signals.”

“Tell them, then, for God’s sake!”

“This is my fight, Mister Paul. I am the cause of it all, basically. If you are not coming with me, promise to say no word to the special-agent gentlemen when I go.”

“And if I don’t promise?”

Adam eyed me speculatively. Then he gave me his fear grin, his lips drawn back to reveal his realigned but still dauntingly primitive teeth. “I will bite you, Mister Paul.” In the light from the cut-glass swag lamp at the end of the bar, Adam’s teeth winked at me like ancient scrimshawed ivory.

“You give me no choice,” I said.

“I’ll get my jacket and some heat,” Bilker said, wiping his hands on a towel. He exited the wet-bar booth and trotted off toward his converted pantry.

We told the agents we were going out for some fresh air and doughnuts from Dunkin’ Donuts. We’d bring back whatever they wanted—cream-filled, buttermilk, old-fashioned, they could choose.

“Make it quick,” Le May cautioned. “Mrs. Montaraz can take a call upstairs, but we’ll need your input after we’ve taped it. Going out’s risky. You could miss it.”

“Thirty minutes,” Adam said. “No more.”

We took my Mercedes because I did not feel competent to handle the hatchback with its elevated foot pedals or Bilker’s dented ’54 Chevy. I was driving, rather than Bilker, because Adam wanted Bilker to have his hands free. He was riding shotgun, a position of “great importance.” Now, though, it seemed funny to be driving so big and expensive an automobile as my Mercedes to a one-sided rendezvous with a murderer.

Adam directed me to park on Ralph McGill Boulevard about two blocks below the old school buildings housing the Abraxas art complex. We would have to walk the rest of the way, but Craig was not likely to shoot out my windshield or riddle a sheet of the car’s body metal with bullet holes.

It had begun to rain, lightly. An ocean of upside-down combers rumbled above the treetops. Traffic was nonexistent, and the three of us trudged uphill on the margin of the street. The plummeting runoff had not yet acquired volume or momentum, our shoes remained dry, and the cooling thunderstorm seemed an ally rather than an enemy.

“Dristle,” I said. “That’s what Livia George calls a rain like this.”

“Very good,” Adam replied.

Bilker halted at the top of the hill. An elm-lined row of clapboard houses curved downhill to our left. In the dark, we could see Atlanta’s skyline, traffic lights reflecting on wet pavement between Abraxas and the city. The old school building loomed in the rain like an insane asylum from a florid gothic novel. Its studio annex perched on the downslope of the ill-kept property as if it might soon slide away, like a stilt-supported house on the California coast. Brooding. Medieval. (Horace Walpole, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe would have loved the place.)

“No security?” Bilker said. “At a gallery?”

“The third-floor galleries are between shows,” Adam said. “So the studio wing is tightly locked.”

“Locked-schmocked. Folks will pick locks. This place needs round-the-clock security. Needs some lights on it, too.”

“Needs its grass mowed,” I said.

“No money for a guard,” Adam said. “No money for lights.”

I remembered that on my first trip to Abraxas, David Blau had griped about the current administration’s miserly treatment of the arts. Of course, Blau and his staff members could, and did, initiate money-raising projects of their own, but funding a security force had always taken a back seat to strong financial support for major new shows and deserving artists. For the two weeks of the Kander-Montaraz-Haitian exhibit, Blau had in fact hired a full-time security guard, but no one served that function tonight because there was nothing noteworthy to protect.

Adam said we must enter from the back. We crossed an asphalt drive that dead-ended forty or fifty feet farther on, and crept into the shadow of the print shop next to the school. We advanced single-file through soggy leaves and grass, hung a left at the end of the print shop, and wound up staring into the rear half of the facility’s car park. Trees closed off the back of the lot. Power-company spools and strange varieties of metallic trash showed in the gaps among the trees as mysterious lumps and silhouettes. Tonight, unlike in February, the trees’ branches were weighted with summer foliage, and the mist dripping through the leaves made the asphalt echo as if it were a basement drying room with dozens of frilly black-green dresses on its lines. We entered the shelter of a covered rampway leading directly to the main building’s rear entrance. From this ramp, we saw the whole parking lot and, straight across from us, the studio wing enclosing the lot on that side. Near the building’s door sat the only vehicle in the lot, a red GM pickup with its tailgate lowered. Whoever had parked it had placed an extension ladder in its loadbed so that the ladder cleared the rampway’s corrugated roof and leaned against the wall about twenty feet above the covered door.

“He’s here,” I said. “The bastard’s actually here.”

Adam shushed me. He told Bilker and me to stay under cover while he tried to determine exactly how Craig had entered Abraxas. Adam would go because he was less likely to be seen than Bilker or I. So, bending his back almost parallel to the asphalt, he did a graceful Groucho Marx slither that carried him to a crouching position behind the GM. He tilted his head to gaze up into the rain at the ladder and the wall. Then he Groucho Marx’d his way back to us and said that Craig had apparently climbed to the full extension of the ladder and then thrown a rope with a grappling hook into the barnlike window on the building’s third floor. This window belonged to a vacant supply room across an interior corridor from the curator’s office. The grappling hook was still caught on the sill, the rope from it dangling down a foot or two below the top of the ladder. Craig probably did not intend to use it again, though, because he could far more easily come down the stairs and let himself out the back than risk the slippery rope and the slippery ladder by which he had gained entry.

“We ought to call the house,” I said. “Tell Niedrach.”

“No. Up there, Mister Paul, I am going now.” Adam took a key from his trouser pocket and gave it to Bilker. “Go inside and guard the stairs so that, by them, the villain does not make successful his getaway.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Following me up is okay and probably silenter than taking stairs. Or wait down here. I am happier, though, should you come.”

“Why?”

“Morale support: To subdue young Puddicombe may take two of us—someone to bludger him, someone to rescue Tiny Paul.”

“Then you’d better let me do it,” Bilker said.

“I fear you’re too heavy,” Adam said. “Paul is much lighter.” He looked me over a tad grimly. “By comparison.”

I was scared. Neither Adam nor I had a firearm. Bilker would have the Ruger, of course, but he would be standing in the downstairs corridor waiting for Craig to come to him. Craig might not choose to do so. He’d have a weapon or two of his own, and if Adam and I bumbled into him in the galleries, he would not hesitate to cut us down. More important, if he had rappeled up the wall after climbing the first third of the way on his extension ladder, could we expect him to have T. P.? Our chances of retrieving the child alive dwindled by the moment. I think even Adam knew that.

To Bilker’s and my surprise, the habiline shed his clothes. He pulled off his shoes, shimmied out of his trousers, and ducked free of his shirt. “I am silenter this way, and better camouflaged… like a commando.” He looked at me. “You too?”

“Oh, no.”

“The shoes, then. The shoes and socks. To make you have a grip both firm and silent on the ladder rungs.”

Bilker grinned, enjoying my discomfiture. I removed my shoes and socks. Adam nodded the bodyguard toward the door, and Bilker used the key to open it. He gave us a thumbs-up sign and disappeared into the concrete maw of the building. Adam and I ran to the truck’s loadbed, eased into it, and squatted in the rain looking at the great hinged door high in the rear wall. Next to this door, or shutter, were three tall windows of a more conventional design; they lacked glass, and someone had fitted them with opaque sheets of polyethylene, which, now tattered, made faint popping noises. My fear deepened. I was developing, while still on the ground (or near it), a bad case of acrophobia. A surreal kind of dizziness gripped me. Adam attributed to me more courage and athletic ability than I had. By this route, I could fall to my death trying to enter Abraxas.

“Adam—”

“I will go first. No need to brace ladder. Side of truck suffices.” Naked, the mist matting his body hair, he swung to the pickup’s side to mount the ladder. Bouncing on its rungs and pulling at its uprights, he tested its reliability. “Is okay,” he announced, and he climbed it like a monkey shinnying lickety-split up a tree. At the top, Adam grabbed the rope hanging from the sill and threw himself clear of the ladder. Expecting him to come crashing down on the rampway’s corrugated roof, I flinched. Adam’s feet hit the vertical face of the wall, though, and he walked himself up the rope to the hinged window shutter. Here, he turned and squatted on the sill, a gargoyle on a somewhat shoddy cathedral. The gargoyle beckoned to me.

I willed myself to move. My bare feet tingled on the ladder’s cold aluminum rungs. I climbed with my eyes on Adam. If I looked down, I’d panic. The habiline drew nearer as I rose, but still seemed far, far away. At the top of the ladder, I had no idea what to do. I could not grab the hanging rope without letting go of the ladder’s uprights. Trapped between heaven and hell, I laid my face against the unyielding bricks of the building. Dear God. Dear God.

A creaking sound made me look up again. A second rope fell out of the sky, to slap and abrade my forehead. Adam had pushed the hinged door of the window outward, revealing a block-and-tackle by which the gallery sometimes lifted heavy objets d’art to the third floor. I slipped the loop of this rope around my waist and gripped it high with both hands. Adam, holding the other end, backed away from the window, and I began to rise, my feet dangling like stunned pink fish. I closed my eyes until the faint squeaking of the pulley had ceased and the window ledge was there before me as an accomplished fact. More noisily than I wanted, I went over it into the supply room.

Adam touched my shoulder. “Somewhere he is in the galleries. As yet, I think, the rain has let us escape his detection. Soon, he will return. Come.” Even his whisper was something of a growl. I disentangled myself from the rope, and together we crossed the supply room to the door. We eased through into nearly impenetrable dark, hearing the rain as a steady drumming, a hum like that of a huge refrigerator. Without it, Craig would have long since detected us—or me, at least. Adam could move as silently as a daddy longlegs racehorsing over a mound of warehoused cotton.

We crept past Blau’s huge office into Gallery One: a bleak, echoing immensity. A miserly kind of illumination entered via the horizontal windows at the top of the wall fronting McGill Boulevard. No paintings, installations, or sculptures. Abraxas was between shows, and the galleries reposed high above the street like empty boxcars. Gallery Three was even darker than the one in which we were standing. It had no windows. But from Gallery Two, the chamber in which Blau had shown M.-K. Kander’s upsetting photos, pale light spilled. It lay across Gallery One’s scuffed hardwood floor like a film of buttermilk, a liquid gleam in the dimness. Adam pointed at it. With his other hand, he clutched my arm. I imagined him clutching a habiline lieutenant on a prehistoric African savannah, giving directions for a life-or-death hunt, just as he gripped me now. What we did in the next one or two minutes would no doubt determine the outcome of our stalk.

Adam said, “I go to door. You make noise. He come out, I grab. This not work, you shout, ‘Bilker!’ Understand?” I nodded.

Adam floated, making no noise, across the room, flattened his back against the wall, and twisted his torso to look into Gallery Two. Then he vented such a powerful cry that it vibrated my bones, bounced from the walls, and flooded the building like a dam burst of gasoline, threatening to plunge everything into a chaos of fire. Still yelling, Adam charged into the gallery. Without listening for them, my ears registered Bilker’s footsteps and belugalike snorts as he pounded upstairs to the third floor.

“You goddamn hibber!” a voice in the lighted chamber cried.

A gunshot barked, reverberated, pinged away. Fear forgotten, or submerged, I sprinted toward the sound. A two-legged blur in stained whites burst from the chamber, bumped me hard, and spun away from the impact as I crashed down on my tailbone and slid backward across the floor. Sprawling sidelong, I saw this figure disappear into the supply room through which Adam and I had entered.

As I tried to sit back up, Adam scampered in from Gallery Two, one gnarled hand holding his forearm just below the elbow. Blood glistened on his hairy fingers, oozed from the wound beneath them. He paused to regard me sitting on the floor, but his eyes danced frantically from me to the supply room.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“’Bye. Be back.” He hurried toward the supply room, and I shouted a warning that the other man still had his gun. As soon as I did, the figure in white reemerged from the supply room and fired several more shots into the gallery. Flames leapt from the stubby barrel like the sinister tongue flickers of a gila monster. Adam dove to his left, while I rolled over and over, praying the bullets gouging the nearby hardwood would not ricochet into my body. The gunman decided against trying to escape by rope and ladder, unlatched the big door between Blau’s office and the supply room, and slipped into the stairwell opposite the one by which Bilker Moody had just now reached the galleries. Adam, back on his feet, pursued the fleeing man.

Another gunshot sounded in the dark, this one from behind me. I ducked and covered my head. Two more shots bit into the third floor’s sundered stillness. I uncovered cautiously. Bilker had shot the lock off the door blocking his way into Abraxas’s main display rooms. He kicked that door open and waddled into view like a trash-compacted Marshal Dillon. “Why’re you sittin’ there on your butt, Mr. Loyd?” He blew on the barrel of his Ruger. “Where’d they go?”

“Down. Out. Lot of good that pistol of yours did us.”

Bilker looked about, narrowing and widening his eyes, to get them to adjust. The light spilling from Gallery Two seemed the major source of his discomfort. He shielded his eyes with his hands.

“Craig wounded Adam,” I said. “He damned near killed us both. And you, our armed protector, too late to do anything but shoot holes in a door. Good show, Bilker.” I got up. My coccyx felt like the tip of the burning candle of my spine. I put a hand to the seat of my pants and held it there, grimacing.

“Mr. Montaraz posted me downstairs.”

“You’re not there now. Craig’s getting away.”

“You think I’m fuckin’ twins, a upstairs Bilker to hold your hand, a downstairs Bilker to guard the exits?” He’d just lumbered up three flights, exertion equivalent to an average man’s doing the same thing toting fifty pounds of potatoes. Miraculously, he was not breathing all that hard. “I got one body, doofus. It don’t do simultaneous appearances at two or three different locales.”

“I guess not. Forgive me.”

“Mr. Montaraz’ll catch the sucker. The bastard’s doomed in a foot race.” But he had finished bantering. “Where’s Paulie?”

The question sobered me. I nodded at Gallery Two. “In there, I’m afraid. The scream you heard—it was Adam’s. Something in there set it off.”

Side by side, we entered the peculiarly shaped room. Bilker stared for several moments at what it revealed. Then he mumbled a threat against the perpetrator, backed away, turned, and trotted off after Adam and Paulie’s murderer. I heard him yank open the stairwell door and its wheeze as it shut behind him. Then there was nothing but the air-conditioner hum of the rain.

Evidently, Craig had brought T. P. up the ladder with him dead. He’d carried the kid in a cardboard box with makeshift rubber shoulder harnesses (pieces of innertubing) pushed through slits in the cardboard. The box lay at the far end of the gallery. It had contained a few other items besides my godson’s body—a sheaf of Newsweek covers, a package of blue balloons, a coil of rope, and a large fabric-sculpture doll licensed by Babyland General Hospital in Cleveland, Georgia. From this female Little Person, Craig had ripped all the high-priced designer clothes, exposing the pinched knot of her bellybutton and the faint Caucasian flush of her fabric nudity.

I wondered what her name was. Babyland General gave them all their own names, no two alike, and Xavier Roberts, their creator, and his staff had once sent birthday cards to the dolls and their owners on the dolls’ “placement dates.” Many times at the West Bank, I’d had to fix a special plate for a doll whose pouting adoptive mother had refused to eat her own meal unless Abigail Faye or Dorothy Lilac was served something, too. We had made a little extra money from the intractability of these little girls, but the sniveling surrender of their parents and the sight of a moronic fabric-sculpture doll leaning into a bowl of chocolate chile had always galled me. Moreover, the supposedly individualistic Little People had cost seven or eight times what a poorer or less indulgent parent would pay for a plastic doll of comparable size—a doll like the one Craig had left in Nancy Teavers’s lap at the Unaffiliated Meditation Center on Euclid Avenue.

Anyway, this naked Little Person hung four feet off the gallery floor on a piece of nylon cord. The cord was tied to a movable metal track just below the ceiling. As naked as his female companion, Tiny Paul hung to her left on another cord. Both pathetic little figures were lifeless, the doll from the moment of its manufacture, Tiny Paul deprived of breath at an instant I could not estimate. Limp blue balloons clung to the mouths of both figures. Craig had stuck them to their lips with mucilage. Excess mucilage glittered on their faces like dried semen. Other limp blue balloons lay strewn about the floor as if the Great Inflator had lost either his faith or his mind. By contrast, Paulie’s minute penis poked out like the valve on a bicycle tire, mocking the flaccid bladders on the floor. I sagged against a wall and knocked four or five Newsweek covers to the floor. Dozens of repetitions of Adam and RuthClaire, above the legend THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHY / An Art in Militant Transition, were plastered to the chamber’s walls.

That’s what Craig had been doing when Adam looked in, pasting up magazine covers, applying them with a hand-held brush and a solution of wallpaper paste. A Tupperware container full of the oatmealish goo was propped at an angle against the base of the door. Craig had brought everything upstairs with him in his cardboard box: murder victim, doll, magazine covers, cord, brush, wallpaper paste. A performance-art activity of fatal comprehensiveness, the ultimate existential Dadaism. I slumped to the floor, dragging more covers down with me. Fie on art. Fie on THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHY. Fie on Craig Puddicombe.

Looking at my godson’s rotating shadow on the floor, and then at my own upward-jutting toes, I began to weep. This little piggie went to market, this little piggie stayed home. I studied my toes through a distorting film of tears. They were fascinating, my toes, each indisputably unique: Abigail Faye, Dorothy Lilac, Hepzibah Rose, Karma Leigh, and Cherry Helena. The other five had names, too. They were all detachable. You could unplug them from my feet and adopt them out to deserving amputees. Some of the sorry farts would treat them badly, of course, and maim them in unconscionable ways that made you ashamed to belong to a species possessing toes. Detachable little piggies suspended from gallows, so many innocent little lynching victims….

Bilker had his hand on my shoulder. “You didn’t cut the poor little fella down, Mr. Loyd?” His voice was gentle.

“I was going to.”

“I’ll do it.”

A scruple surged into my murky brain. “Should you touch him? This is a crime scene, Bilker. Shouldn’t everything stay as it is?”

“The poor kid’s been away from home long enough as it is.”

I began to get to my piggies, my bare, dirty feet.

Bilker doubled a loop in the nylon cord above Tiny Paul’s head, inserted the blade of his pocketknife, and sawed at the cord vigorously. “Do I give a shit,” he said, “about the holiness of crime scenes? I’ve just blown Puddicombe’s fuckin’ face away. Which the Effin’ Bee Aye ain’t likely to be crazy about, neither.” He sawed and sawed. “And I’ll be damned if even that worries me.” The cord finally broke, and Bilker caught T. P. in his arms. “You want to hold him?”

Did I want to hold him? I must have appeared to, for Bilker brought the child to me and put him in my arms. He was cold and rigid, like a plastic doll. The small pudgy half-breed who had charmed Caroline in Everybody’s. The same but not the same. A shell. A gallery room without statues or paintings. Where had all the life gone?

And where was Adam? I asked Bilker.

“Puttin’ on his clothes. I tied a hankie ’round his goddamn elbow. It’s not too bad. C’mon, let’s not make him shinny up here after us again. He might pass out.”

I pulled the balloon off T. P.’s lip and dropped it into the container of wallpaper paste by the door. We left the galleries by the stairs that Bilker had earlier climbed and found Adam in the parking lot, fully dressed except for his shoes. He was holding his shoes with his fingers hooked inside their heels so they hung down beside his knee. As he stood in the middle of the parking lot, rain slowly filled the oily puddles around his bare feet. Puddicombe’s truck sat behind him with its driver’s-side door open and the driver slumped forward, his head between the open door and the steering wheel. The ladder once propped against the wall from the loadbed lay on the asphalt, on an impotent diagonal.

Apparently, Craig had pulled the ladder clear of the rampway roof, driven out of the lot, and then reversed directions in an attempt to back over his habiline pursuer. Adam had leapt into the truck, Craig had made the GM fishtail to shake him out, and Bilker had lumbered out of Abraxas in time to fire his Ruger .357 magnum through the pickup’s open window into Craig’s head. Puddicombe had been so focused on bucking Adam out of the truck that he had not even seen Bilker. As a result, his determination to leave tire tracks on Adam had proved fatal… for him.

I was not sorry. I was relieved.

Bilker and I stepped through the fallen ladder’s rungs and joined Adam in the middle of the lot. I held Paulie out to him. Adam set his shoes down, in a puddle that half-submerged them, and took the child, holding T. P. with his hands under his back so he could nuzzle his son’s bloated belly and mumble comfort into his death-stopped ears.

Bilker approached the truck and tumbled the killer from the driver’s seat. With a sucking thud, his corpse sprawled onto the ebony pavement, most of its face gone. He was unrecognizable as anything but an adult male in stained painter’s coveralls. Where had the malevolent energy of his life just fled? Bilker kicked the corpse three or four times, each kick more vicious than the last.

“Don’t,” Adam said. “For him, it is over.”

Bitterly, Bilker said, “It ain’t over for you and Mrs. Montaraz, or for me. We’ll be livin’ with the fuckin’ fallout from this for the rest of our lives.”

Still holding his dead son, Adam walked over to Bilker and looked him full in the face. “I don’t think so. We will not forget, but later our shroud of grief will unravel, and we will be as good as new again.” Bilker and I gaped at Adam. Bilker turned and spat into a puddle, but we both understood there was something willful about Adam’s saintly serenity. It was too soon for forgiveness and reconciliation, too soon to offer up T. P.’s innocent body as a sacrifice to human understanding. Bilker and I were appalled. We had angers and hatreds to be worked out, sorrows and sufferings from which to distill a thin, bittersweet balm. Magnanimity, right now, was an emotional non sequitur.

“I’ll get the car,” I said. But Bilker and Adam walked with me, and we drove back to Hurt Street without saying another word.

Fingerprints identified the man shot by Bilker as Craig Raymond Puddicombe. In the dead man’s wallet were two driver’s licenses, both of them false. One identified him as Teavers, Elvis Lamar. He’d taken great care to use this alias and the Montaraz address near Inman Park when he did not wish to be traced to his rental property, a frame house on the southeastern arc of I-285. The other driver’s license gave his name as Burdette, Gregory R. It pinpointed the location of his house off the perimeter expressway. As Greg Burdette, Craig had lived in Atlanta for nearly eight months, working in a collateral branch of the profession practiced by Adam and RuthClaire. Like them, he was a painter. Unlike them, he did houses, garages, and signboards. He worked fairly regularly, but had to scratch for jobs to stay ahead of his debts.

For two reasons, the FBI let Special Agent Niedrach and his GBI colleagues conclude the kidnapping investigation. First, Niedrach and Davison had handled the Klan episode in Beulah Fork at the end of last summer; and, second, Craig Puddicombe and his accomplice-victim had never taken Tiny Paul out of the Greater Atlanta area.

Therefore, local agents interviewed the woman who had rented “Greg Burdette” his house, his most frequent fellow painters, and some of the contractors and home owners who had hired him. Their assessment was that Burdette lived quietly and frugally, never talked about his past, never shirked on a job, and tackled even the dull business of caulking a rain gutter as if it were a signal step in a fiscal game plan that would one day free him of the need to paint houses. Everyone who had known him, in fact, assumed that his highest purpose in life was to become rich. Although he never flaunted this ambition, he took care of his money, made his bids competitive without underselling himself, and insisted on payment in full before leaving the premises of any completed job. He set forth this condition at the outset of every enterprise, and his reputation as a conscientious workman—one who’d clean rain gutters, scrape away old paint, apply reliable primers, and so on—rarely failed to win his employers’ agreement.

His Achilles heel, if he had one, was an inability to work with blacks. He refused to do so. Blacks never appeared on any of the painting crews he hired out to or put together himself. Two or three times, at least, he had passed up jobs because a contractor had wanted him to share the work with a black painter. Similarly, he painted the home of a black only if he could work with a crew consisting solely of whites. This seldom happened. Oddly, though, his refusal to work with blacks never led him to badmouth them. Stereotypical comments about intelligence levels, food stamps, welfare Cadillacs, and illegitimate babies never passed his lips. He shut down on the subject of blacks altogether, visibly holding himself in, as if struggling to obey the homely injunction, “If you can’t say anything good about someone, don’t say,” etc., but the suppressed hostility of this effort tightened his jaw and set his eyes jitterbugging. In one way, it was funny. In another, it was frightening.

One former associate remembered that Greg strongly approved of the Fulton County DA’s crusade against pornography. Massage parlors, adult bookstores, and adult theaters disgusted him. He would cuss a blue streak with no qualm or discernible sense that some people might find such language as offensive as he found photographs of naked people. In hot weather, he worked in denim cutoffs and tennis shoes, shirtless and proud of it—but, given a context marginally interpretable as erotic, bare skin outraged him. Once, during a lunch break, he had yanked a men’s magazine from a seventeen-year-old apprentice who had held up the foldout for his approval. “This is shit you’re lookin’ at!” he had raged.

The house on I-285 yielded even more information. As Greg Burdette, Craig had been careful not to subscribe to any publications that state or federal law-enforcement agencies might classify as racist or provocatively right-wing. But he had bought them from newsstands, where possible, and had taken pains not to visit the same newsstands often enough to give their operators any real grasp of his reading habits. These were magazines devoted to firearms, post-nuclear-holocaust survival, legal redress for white “victims” of affirmative-action laws, and creationism. Along with these magazines, agents had found, stuffed in drawers, circulars announcing Klan meetings and pamphlets on many topics from ultraconservative politicians. Also, Craig had possessed a small arsenal of unregistered handguns, most with serial numbers metal-rasped or sandpapered away. A bulletin board in his bedroom displayed clippings from the Atlanta newspapers about racial conflict and crimes perpetrated by blacks. Prominent among these clippings was one recounting the acquittal of some Klansmen in a Greensboro, North Carolina, murder trial. Craig had marked every word in the headline with a red highlighter.

Also in the house: items suggesting that Nancy Teavers had lived there with him at least three months—clothing, toilet articles, mementoes of her marriage to Craig’s dead friend, E. L. In fact, the arrangement of sleeping quarters in the little house—Nancy occupying a room that Craig had once set aside as a business office—strongly suggested that they’d treated each other as brother and sister. The punk wardrobe that Nancy had worn to Sinusoid Disturbances, the GBI agents discovered not in Nancy’s bedroom but in a steamer trunk at the foot of Craig’s bed. Perhaps he had had a fetishistic fascination with such items. The clothes in Nancy’s “closet,” a cardboard chifforobe purchased from a long-defunct Forest Park dry cleaners, had about them a small-town conventionality totally at odds with the shabby glitter of the getup in the trunk. Moreover, Nancy had filled her bedroom with decorative pillows, stuffed animals, even a few dolls. The Little People doll that Craig had hung up in Abraxas beside T. P. had been Nancy’s. Her late husband had given it to her for Christmas over three years ago. An interview with Nancy’s mother revealed that, in the privacy of her mobile home in Beulah Fork, the young woman had behaved around that fabric-sculpture infant—Bonnie Laurel—as if it were a living baby. More than anything, Nancy’s mother told the GBI interviewer, her daughter had wanted to bear her own child. She and E. L. had just about decided to take the plunge when… but if you knew E. L.’s fate, those words constituted an unfortunate turn of phrase.

Craig had strangled Nancy in the little house off I-285. The Newsweek cover that had caused him to flip out, a betrayal of his every hate-handicapped concept of decency, had probably merely surprised Nancy, without leading her to believe that only the child’s murder would properly expiate and punish the parents’ flagrant sin. She had resisted Craig’s arguments to kill Paulie. Her resistance had further outraged him. He had attacked her. Signs of the struggle marked the house and her body: overturned chairs, broken dishes, a curtain pulled off its rod. The coroner’s report on Nancy mentioned not only contusions about her throat, but also deep bites on her breasts and upper arms, and her severely cracked ribs. She was small, though, and Craig had overpowered her—after their initial chase and scuffle—with ease. Afterward, he had dressed her in the orangutan outfit, which he’d rented shortly before or shortly after her murder. Her installation in the sanctuary of the Little Five Points Unaffiliated Meditation Center had then had to await the cover of darkness.

As for Tiny Paul… Is there any need to continue? The reader can imagine the details of the child’s execution far more easily than I can write them.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, the child’s body was shipped to a crematorium in Macon. On Wednesday, his ashes were returned to the Montarazes in an ornate funerary urn. They had decided together on this means of disposing of the corpse, and, upon the recovery of Tiny Paul’s ashes, they observed a private memorial service in their own home. Bilker Moody attended these rites, but Caroline Hanna and I did not because Adam had asked me to run an errand in Beulah Fork—to visit Craig’s family and to invite his mother to bury Craig beside T. P.’s ashes in a state-approved plot of my pecan grove on Paradise Farm. It was an errand I might not have accomplished without Caroline along for moral support. Morale support, to use Adam’s own coinage.

Public reaction to Tiny Paul’s murder was prolonged, sometimes thoughtful, occasionally fulsome, and always wearying. The President sent a wire, as did other prominent heads of state, including the Pope. A triumvirate of East African leaders released a joint communiqué offering the Montarazes citizenship in their countries and free transportation “home.” A. P. Blair, the Zarakali paleoanthropologist, sent a two-page handwritten letter of commiseration and belated apology, but neither RuthClaire nor Adam could deduce from his self-referential prose the specific injustice for which he was apologizing. A host of network commentators and TV evangelists delivered eulogies. Every major daily newspaper in the country ran an editorial. In Atlanta, by special gubernatorial dispensation, the flags on the capitol grounds were flown at half-mast. Even more impressive, a procession of people clad in crepe marched in triple columns through Inman park to the mournful music of drums, fifes, and bagpipes. In Beulah Fork, I closed the West Bank for the remaining five days of our work week.

Georgia Highway Patrolmen directed traffic. Uninvited out-of-towners they sent back to the interstate. Relatives, friends, and invited locals, they checked through the front gates of Paradise Farm. They also saw to it that those who could not park their vehicles inside the walls pulled them safely off the two-lane connecting Tocqueville and Beulah Fork.

Through the window of the upstairs bedroom we’d shared, Caroline estimated that nearly every inhabitant of Beulah Fork had showed up—nothing like a funeral to draw people together and nothing like a double funeral for a killer and his final victim to swell the crowd a hundredfold. My parched front lawn swarmed with would-be mourners. Most women wore Sunday dresses or tailored Sunday suits. Most men, ties knotted beneath their Adam’s apples like tourniquets, sported linen or seersucker jackets. A gay solemnity informed their movements. Some children with scrubbed faces clung to the adults’ hands. Other children, more eager, darted through the maundering crowd to find good places in the pecan grove from which to watch the ceremony.

“Thank God we don’t have to feed this bunch,” Caroline said.

Standing at a mirror trying to put a Windsor knot in a new tie, I grunted.

Fifteen security guards roamed the grounds, while a sixteenth had his vantage on the widow’s-walk just above the room that Caroline and I were in. The Montarazes and I were sharing the cost of the guards, RuthClaire and Adam because the FBI had told them that most of their ransom money would be recovered, I because I hoped to keep a few of the rowdier mourners out of my flowerbeds and shrubbery.

Caroline kept tabs on the number of mourners here for Craig Puddicombe and for Tiny Paul. So far, she said, the latter group seemed to have the upper hand. If any active Klan members had come, they’d had either the tact or the caution to leave their sheets on their beds and their dunce caps on high closet shelves. Besides, a few of those coming to pay their respects to young Puddicombe surely had no Klan affiliation at all.

“Have you seen Craig’s mother?”

“Bilker met her at the gate and took her around back fifteen or twenty minutes ago. She’s fine.”

“Does she know Bilker shot her son?”

“I don’t think so. I hope not.”

Beyond the gate, Caroline saw vans belonging to the Atlanta, Columbus, and Tocqueville newspapers, and three or four TV news vans too. I had asked the highway patrol to keep them from entering. I had also ordered my security people to apprehend any intruders and return them to the gate. Paradise Farm was private property, today’s ceremony was to benefit family and guests, and reporters in their capacity as reporters were not welcome. If they chose to ignore these fiats, the Montarazes would sue them for invasion of privacy while I pressed charges for unlawful trespass.

At last, I signaled to Caroline I was ready to go. To my shame, she had finished dressing at least ten minutes before me. Her knee-length white dress had bunched sleeves and a rectangle of blue-and-white English smocking across the bodice. She put her arm through mine, and we left the room together.

“I could not have done this if RuthClaire had come,” she said.

She was talking about spending the night with me in my former wife’s old house. It had seemed strange to me, too. Had RuthClaire accompanied Adam to Paradise Farm, I would have been no more able to share a bed with Caroline than Caroline with me. But my ex had not come to Beulah Fork. The very thought of a double funeral for her son and his murderer had appalled her. Therefore, she and Adam had had a private ceremony on Hurt Street. Afterward, she had flown to Charlotte to visit an octogenarian maiden aunt and to recuperate from an ordeal that would always haunt her. She was there now, boycotting Adam’s ostentatious show of generosity and forgiveness.

In the back yard, Adam stood on the deck facing a crowd that pressed against the cedar platform and spread out into the pecan grove. In a grassy area cordoned off with red velvet ropes and brass posts, Caroline and I joined the Puddicombes. We stood right in front of the deck, and none of the Puddicombes looked at or spoke to us as we entered. I nodded at familiar faces outside the paddock, but to most of the mourners our arrival was a sign to shut up and stop jostling. Only the midges and a few frolicsome mockingbirds in the pecan trees refused to settle down.

“Welcome to these sacred rites,” Adam said. Of all those present, only Caroline, Bilker, and I had ever heard him speak before, and the guttural aspect of his voice—its powerful growliness—seemed to startle some of those around us. Small as he was, Adam commanded attention. He had worn a silk top hat, a frock coat with tails, striped ambassadorial trousers, a white vest, a dove-gray tie, and spats. To his right was a pedestal draped with a piece of velvet reminiscent of the voodoo banners that David Blau had once shown in Abraxas. Atop the covered pedestal sat the burial urn containing Tiny Paul’s ashes. To Adam’s left, the bier upon which Craig Puddicombe’s casket rested. The casket also boasted a colorful, sequined banner. In the August sun, the sequins glittered like melting ice.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the habiline said. He gave everyone a painful grimace, almost a fear-grin. “For most of my last year in your strange country, it has worried me, the problem of what I am to you and how I must be standing spiritually in the scales of God. Longer, I will not worry. We all come from and go back to dust.”

“Amen!” said Livia George behind us. She, Hazel Upchurch, and a small contingent of local blacks occupied an area between the trees and the sundeck.

“My dead son had a soul, as did the young man who murdered him. And I, Adam Montaraz, citizen and exile, habiline and human, have a soul—as does the heartbroken mother of Craig Puddicombe. All God’s children, I say unto you, have souls.”

“Praise the Lord,” said a man next to Hazel Upchurch.

“All who suffer and know that they suffer, all who yearn for solace and know that they yearn, all who have heavenly expectations and know that they have them—all such, I emphatically say, have souls, for it is our souls that suffer, yearn, expect, and know, our souls that feel the pain, sorrow, and joys of each of these deeply feeling processes.”

“Amen,” murmured many people approvingly.

“My God,” I whispered, “he’s preaching a full-bore sermon.”

Caroline shushed me.

“The soul is what the body does, I say. It is also the perceptive self-knowledge of its doing what it does. Paulie, my dead son, was beginning to grow into such soulful awareness. His soul, I must tell you, was beginning to bloom. No one here today, I fear, can guess at the shape toward which it was tending, but in my heart—yes, my father’s proudness speaks now—I am almost sure it would have been beautiful, very beautiful.”

“Praise God.”

“The soul of Craig Puddicombe had already opened.” He gestured at the vevés-draped casket. “It had an unhappy shape because he was unhappy. He hated and knew that he hated. He killed and knew that he killed. He hurt and knew that he hurt. He knew that even by giving pieces of this hurt to others, he would never—not ever—uproot the hurt sickening him unto very death. His soul would never in this life acquire a happy spiritual handsomeness.”

“Growing up, he was always a good boy!” shouted Craig Puddicombe’s mother. “His soul was as handsome as anybody’s!”

This outburst embarrassed Mrs. Puddicombe. She folded her arms beneath her breasts and hunched her shoulders. Caroline reached as if to pat her on the arm, but the woman leaned into her father-in-law, a sickly man with glazed eyes, to avoid an outsider’s touch.

“I am very sure that was so,” Adam told the woman, gazing at her with a puzzled expression. “He did as other children do, and his soul was what he did. Later, his doings—and thus his soul—fell under sway of older, more twisted souls, and so began to deform its youngling beauty toward these unhappy shapes. In children, my many friends from Beulah Fork, the soul is very plastic.”

“The soul ain’t plastic, Mister Adam!” shouted a black man next to Livia George. Several people, including two devout fundamentalist whites, seconded this objection.

“Never do I mean to imply the soul is what you would call, well, a synthetic polymer,” Adam said. “Please understand. The soul is immaterial. It has no location. But because it is what the body does and knows, it can be shaped. Metaphorically, I say. Likewise literally. All this, I have learned painfully in your great but strange country.”

“The soul don’t have nothing to do with the body!” shouted Ruben Decker, my neighbor one farm to the south. “It’s spiritual and everlasting!” Adam, somewhat sadly, was shaking his head. Other people in the crowd, primarily men, loudly proclaimed both a rigorous body-soul dichotomy and the immortality of the soul in that transtemporal realm known as heaven. Their phraseology was country allegory—“The body die, but the soul rise up!” “Gonna live forever with Jesus!”—but the message, a kind of received Protestant consensus, set Adam back on his heels.

My hands had begun to sweat. To Caroline, I whispered, “Can you believe this? A theological donnybrook in my own back yard.”

Adam took off his top hat and peered into it as if searching for the proper reply to those whose ire he had aroused. As he readied to speak, the sounds of the rotary blades of a helicopter—thwup! thwup! thwup!—became audible over the treetops to the northeast. Then the copter’s wasplike body tilted into view. It swept over the highway, dropped toward my front lawn, and settled noisily to rest on the other side of the house. Three or four security guards went running that way with their pistols drawn, and many of the people facing the sundeck began pushing and side-stepping one another as if to follow the guards.

Raising his hands, Adam called, “Please, everyone! Let the security persons do their work! No pretext here for rushings about and shovings!” These admonitions calmed many in the crowd, but the hubbub prompted by the helicopter’s arrival kept Adam from continuing the funeral rites. For reassurance, I took Caroline’s hand.

Presently, an entourage of three men in expensive suits, flanked by guards, strode around my house’s corner. The leading figure in this procession was the Right Reverend Dwight “Happy” McElroy. With film-star winks, victorious-politico smiles, and aw-shucks-country-boy nods, he acknowledged the disbelieving delight of many of the mourners on hand. His son Duncan marched two or three steps behind him, while his other meticulously dressed lieutenant—a man with a blond flattop and a suspicious eye, the civilian equivalent of a Secret Service agent—stayed at McElroy’s elbow.

McElroy escaped only by mounting the sundeck and walking toward Adam with his right hand extended. To cheers and applause, he and the habiline shook. My small friend appeared as perplexed as the tall evangelist looked amused and confident: Mutt and Jeff. The men were such physical contrasts that many people laughed.

“What’s ‘Happy’ McElroy doing here?” the evangelist suddenly asked, as if about to launch his own homily. “Well, my son Duncan and I are just in from Louisiana, via Atlanta, to share the grief of two bereaved families; also, to honor Adam Montaraz for a saintly gesture worthy of Our Lord Himself. We could not stay away. Where the sorrow of others calls out for assuaging, there the ministry of Dwight McElroy, God’s consoling servant, must also be. Adam didn’t expressly invite us, no, but that’s because in his humility he feared to impose upon a man as busy about God’s undone work as I. His thoughtfulness is a light unto the nations.”

“Amen!”

“Tell it!”

“But I come for another important reason, too, dear friends—to bring back to this noble man the bread that he and his equally noble wife cast upon the waters of faith, hoping thereby to save the life of the unbaptized infant whose ashes occupy this jar.” McElroy nodded at the urn. He withdrew from an inside jacket pocket (peacock-patterned silk) an official-looking envelope. “Duncan and I, not to mention my wife and Christ-proclaiming partner, Eugenia Lisbeth, are proud to return to the Montarazes the five thousand dollars that their son’s murderer extorted from them as an illicit ‘donation’ to the Greater Christian Constituency. Let no one say that ‘Happy’ McElroy accepted blood money—other than that consecrated in the blood of the Lamb—for God’s work. Let no one say that a life devoted to love chose to profit from the wages of bigotry and hate. Here, Adam, take this check, to put it to more fruitful work than it has thus far done.”

A hush gripped the crowd. Even the mockingbirds had stopped calling and flitting about. McElroy’s offering—his refusal to profit by another’s misfortune—had paralyzed his sweating onlookers with holy wonder.

Adam put his hands behind his back. “Thank you, but I cannot accept it.”

McElroy beamed. “The saintliness of this man is going to be legendary,” he said, beginning to return the envelope to his jacket. “His very generosity cleanses this money of its taint. Cleansed, it can go to work for God. We’re blessed, my friends, to have among us in these evil days such a one.”

Before the crowd could start amen-ing and hallelujah-ing, the mother of Craig Puddicombe spoke up: “That money ought to be guv to us. But for Craig, it wouldn’t’ve been made a donation at all.” She went to the front of the paddock and stuck her hand up at McElroy. “It’s ours by right. It ain’t any of the Greater Christian Constipuancy’s.”

Everyone gawked, me with all the others, the evangelist and the habiline likewise visibly taken aback. The other Puddicombes, the woman’s in-laws and children, stumbled forward to uphold her demand.

“Yes,” Adam finally managed. “Give it to her.”

“But it’s made out to you,” McElroy said. “Not to this improvident person—who whelped the animal that killed your son and the frail woman that helped kidnap him.”

Said Craig Puddicombe’s mother, “He had his bad pints, Craig did, but he never let no one stick his pitcher on a magazine ’thout his pants on. He never held up the poor for pennies on a TV church service.”

Bilker Moody, slouching against a railing behind young Puddicombe’s casket, snickered.

“Mrs. Puddicombe—” McElroy said, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

Said Adam, “I will, what do you call it, endorse? Yes, I will endorse for her the check you’ve brought.” He held out his hand to McElroy, who, as if drugged, passed the check over. Adam endorsed it with a borrowed pen and handed it to Mrs. Puddicombe, who folded it and slid it down the neck of her faded sun dress.

“We’re awful hot,” she said. “You put Craig down decent, now. We’re gonna trust you to do it. Daddy’s too sick to stan’ and watch it. We’re goin’ on home.” With no more fuss, she led her family out of the roped paddock and around the house toward the distant front gate—five thousand dollars richer, beneficiary of a habiline saint.

Caroline and I were now the only two people in the area set aside for Tiny Paul’s and Craig’s immediate families. I looked back to see if my neighbors were staring at us, only to catch a glimpse of Rudy Starnes, cameraman, and Brad Barrington, anchor-flake par excellence, sneaking through the crowd to record another event that was none of their business. They soon reached Livia George and her friends.

Starnes videotaped the crowd, the sundeck, the departing Puddicombes. His sun-bronzed colleague held impromptu interviews with some of the startled people around him. When Barrington accosted Livia George with his mike, though, she shook her finger under his nose, but her apparent fear of further disrupting the ceremony made it hard to hear what she said. My attention shifted when McElroy began talking again:

“Let’s pray for the immortal souls of these dead brothers, the murderer and his innocent victim,” he shouted, still recovering from the loss of his check. “The one seems hellbent by virtue of the virtues he sadly lacked, the other as a result of his parents’ failure to baptize him into the living community of Christ. And so, brothers and sisters, let’s pray for God’s great and redemptive mercy on their immortal souls. Bow your heads and observe with me a moment of loving, intercessory silence.”

“Please leave this platform,” Adam said. “The usurping of my intention to preside does not become you.”

McElroy replied, “Goodness, Adam, I’ve only come to help. You’re gettin’ sorta territorial about this, aren’t you?”

“The soul,” Adam countered, “does not everlast. I am sorry to have to tell you so, but it is what its body did and also its unplaceable self-awareness of that doing. In death, Paulie and Craig are reconciled. Neither goes to hell, neither to heaven. The great pity I feel for them is my pity for the extinction of their souls, one before it could un-deform and one before it could bloom to beauty.”

“Uh oh,” I said.

“Soul is mind,” Adam said patiently. “Neither has location. Neither goes beyond the stoppage of body death except in the continued cherishing of the souls and minds that knew them. All of us have souls, as do I. Important, very important it is that all of us apprehend the other’s soul and value it as we do our own. That is why the ashes of my son I have brought to rest beside the body of his unhappy killer.”

Rudy Starnes had been creeping slowly forward with his portable camera. Soon, he was shooting this scene from the southwestern corner of my sundeck. Barrington, his partner, had already escaped Livia George’s scolding to reach the same vantage and was leaning between two cedar railings to pick up the argument between Adam and McElroy with his hand-held microphone. I wanted to go after them, but Caroline stopped me.

“Bastards think they’re getting a scoop.”

“They are, Paul. Just forget it. Haven’t you been listening to Adam?”

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?”

“Do unto others as they would be done by—insofar as it’s possible to know what they want and insofar as respect for your own sacred self permits you to do it.”

“Is that what he said?”

“Not in those words, no. In other words.”

McElroy said, “The talk you’re talking, Adam, is devil’s talk.”

“Maybe he’s a devil!” shouted a balding man with a string tie and acne-scarred jowls. I uncharitably identified him as a Puddicombe partisan, an unsheeted Klansman. It is possible that he was simply a Baptist.

Adam had no care for the impact his words were making on people like the bald-headed man. “Craig Puddicombe and Tiny Paul live at this moment,” he explained, speaking to McElroy but loudly enough to be heard by all, “because in our respectful ceremony they even yet play with the living who care for them. They are playmates in the soulful system of our shared sorrow, our community remembering. In this way, they live, perfect elements of the ecology of our grief. So long as our self-knowing souls play with them in systems of heartbreak and memory, they live. They remain parts of a flowing system. Try hard as we might, none can fully comprehend such wholeness. But that is okay, that is truly okay. It is only the healthy relationship of us, who live, to them, who have died, that gratifies and greatly blossoms meaning.”

McElroy stared down at Adam like a schoolmaster eyeing a boy who has just wet his pants. “That’s very pretty, Adam. It’s also secular-humanistic buncombe.”

“No!” Adam rejoined. “I spit on those who think they can know me by radiating my bones, weighing my brain, and seeing how many helical heredities I share with the orangutan. I spit on any such, but embrace those who seek to know me by embracing me, seeing my paintings, engaging me in furious Ping-Pong challenge, or praying beside me in midnights of mortal peril.”

“‘Buncombe,’” said Mildred Garroway, an eighty-plus-year-old widow standing just outside our paddock. “‘Helical heredities.’” She smiled at Caroline. “Both those boys can talk, can’t they?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Caroline.

Barrington, the Contact Cable News reporter, had climbed onto my sundeck, near Craig’s casket. Bilker, seeing him, stepped toward the man, but Barrington had already reached across the bier to shove his microphone into Adam’s face.

“Repeat for our viewers what you’ve just said,” he demanded while Rudy Starnes, hunched below the platform, continued to video-tape.

Swiftly breaking in, Bilker slapped the reporter’s mike into the crowd. Several people gasped. McElroy, a more prescient interpreter of danger signals than Barrington, cringed away from this blow and left the deck by the stairway he had earlier mounted. Then he, his son, and their bodyguard retreated around the corner of my house. During their strategic withdrawal, Bilker shook the Contact Cable newsman.

“Your ass is grass, fella.”

“What was that?” Miss Mildred asked Caroline. “What did he say?”

“Let him go,” Adam commanded Bilker. “No hair on his head should you even breathe on.” He dropped his top hat and began to remove his coat. “No more memory rite today,” he told the rest of the mourners in the pecan grove. “You are everybody free to go now. If you stay, I must warn you, you may turn out to act unhappily in something for which you did not bargain.” He folded his coat and placed it on the casket. “Very sorry that bad behavior of Mr. McElroy should prove so deadly to the graceful remembering planned by me for this double funeral.”

“What about the buttin’ in of that fella there?” Livia George shouted, waving her liver-colored palm at Barrington.

“Him, too,” Adam agreed. “Now, everybody, please go.”

I asked Caroline to see Miss Mildred safely to the front gate, where she would have no doubt parked the monstrous Lincoln Continental that her failing eyesight had not yet convinced her to give up driving. Reluctantly, then, the mourners began to straggle along in Caroline and Miss Mildred’s wake, a process not unaccompanied by peeved looks and audible grumbling. Starnes, the cameraman, recorded this withdrawal from my back yard, but not without several glances away from the viewfinder to note how inexorably it was leaving him and Barrington beached on a hostile shore. At last he stopped taping altogether.

Adam had removed his tie and vest. He started to unbutton his shirt. “Once, you barged onto Paradise Farm to film my son’s birth,” he told Barrington. “Today you have barged again, to make unauthorized tape of his burial. True?” He dropped his shirt on the cedar planking.

“It’s our job,” Barrington said. “Getting the news.”

“A sleazy tactic, such sneakery. Do you remember, Brad Barrington, how such provocation stirred me in December?”

“Just let us get our stuff together and we’ll go, Mr. Montaraz.”

Adam, hopping on one foot and then the other, yanked off his shoes. Then he shed his striped ambassadorial trousers. As naked as the day he’d first come to Paradise Farm, he crouched and gave the reporter an alarming threat-grin. Barrington turned, vaulted the deck rail, and landed on the grass beside his cameraman. With no apparent regard for what might become of Starnes, he sprinted through the pecan grove toward Cleve Snyder’s property. Adam jumped to the top of the deck rail, sprang forward ten or twelve feet, and ran Barrington to ground almost effortlessly. He toppled the reporter by leaping on his back, wrapping his legs around the man’s midriff, and applying a half nelson to the nape of his neck. The newsman staggered and fell. A squirrel scampered off through the grass, and the full-throated snarling of the habiline soon had the terrified Brad Barrington crying for mercy.

Bilker came down from the deck, disengaged Starnes from his camera, and threw it against the nearest tree trunk. Its casing shattered, and the sound of its impact echoed away through the pecan grove. “No sweat,” Starnes said, lifting his hands. “I ain’t gonna get testy with you, man. Ain’t my way.”

I hurried out of the paddock to make sure Adam didn’t kill Barrington. Squatting beside the two wrestling men, I tried to grip Adam by the shoulders and pull him away. But where Adam was one moment, Barrington was the next, and their ever-revolving entanglement stymied my efforts to play peacemaker.

Soon, though, I realized Adam was mauling his enemy with saliva and sudden unpredictable shifts of weight. Barrington would be black and blue for a couple of weeks, but he’d survive this noisy struggle—just as he’d survived the one in December. That he had doubts on this score perfectly suited Adam’s purpose. Finally, Barrington curled in upon himself like a fetus, whimpering, and Adam rolled clear of the man.

“Can’t say that I blame you,” I told Adam, above his victim’s caterwauling, “but you’ve used this poor jerk for a scapegoat. You know that, don’t you?”

“I am not a God-damnable saint,” Adam growled. “I am only human.”

He got up and strode toward the house, his swarthy buttocks moving in elegant synchrony, the muscles in his back agleam. “I am only human.” This admission rang in my ears with the unmistakable tenor of bitterness and regret. “I am only human.” An odd feeling came over me. It pained him that he was one of us.

I found myself patting Brad Barrington’s shoulder. “It’s okay, fella. Listen, it’s okay.” But I really had no idea what I was saying.

On Thursday morning, Adam, Caroline, and I attended Nancy Teavers’s funeral at the First Baptist Church in Beulah Fork. It was not as well attended as the fiasco at Paradise Farm, but the pastor eulogized Nancy in a way that actually enabled me to call up her face—not the wan, black-eyed visage of the murder victim in the orangutan costume, but the lively, often mystified features of the young woman who had worked for me at the West Bank. The organ played, and people cried. I wasn’t one of them, though. It was hot, and I was numb.

Craig and Tiny Paul were decently buried. During the relative cool of twilight, long after the inconclusive rites of Wednesday afternoon, we had laid them to rest. Bilker and five members of our security force had played pallbearer for the casket, while Adam had marched behind them with the burial urn in his arms. Both the casket and the urn had gone into the ground in a lovely section of the pecan grove bordering Ruben Decker’s farm. Nancy, of course, was buried next to E. L.’s grave in the cemetery near the school, and it finally seemed that we had all reached a place in our lives where, radically transfigured, we could begin again.

RuthClaire was still in North Carolina and would stay there through the weekend. She and Adam had talked last night on the telephone, but what they had said to each other—how they’d resolved or failed to resolve their quarrel over the double funeral—only they knew. RuthClaire had not asked to speak to Caroline, and Adam was saying nothing about the present state of their relationship. Still, his silence and his listlessness suggested a debilitating melancholy.

Back from Nancy’s funeral, Adam asked me to drive him to the abandoned brick kilns where the young woman’s husband had died. “Why?” I asked him.

“I wish to meditate. And to fast.”

Caroline said, “Couldn’t you do that here?”

“It requires, I think, solitude. And a chance to feel the earth enfolding me as it enfolds my son.”

“But the brick kilns?”

Adam insisted. We could not argue him out of his desire to visit that forbidding place. Finally, Caroline and I drove him there by a county-maintained road. While we sat in the car, he walked along the lips of the crumbling vats. Blackberry vines and poke weed filigreed the red-clay mounds into which these shafts descended, and mockingbirds warbled dark songs. At one opening, Adam knelt and peered downward. Then he eased a leg over and lowered himself into the vat.

I shouted his name.

“Come back for me Sunday morning,” he called. “Until then, never worry.”

“Sunday morning?”

“It is fine, Mister Paul. It is what I need. Water aplenty down there, and in three days no habiline has ever hungered to death.”

“Caroline, tell him to come back to his senses.”

“There’s nothing I can do. He’s made up his mind.”

And so he went down, stayed in the depths of those bottomless kilns until Sunday morning, and greeted us then with a song that spiraled up like a chant through the frozen prayer of a cathedral. Then he emerged into the sunlight physically weaker but spiritually fortified. That afternoon, Caroline drove him back to Atlanta, where he was reunited with RuthClaire on Hurt Street.

And I?

From my position as restaurant owner, gentleman farmer, bachelor, and pagan, I contemplated these matters and decided it was time for me to become… something else, something new, something other.