Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

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

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

Zubowicz and Nollinger spent the night on cots in City Hall.

Hutton, on his own initiative, installed a large piece of plywood over the hole in my picture window and a smaller one over the broken pane in my door. In the morning, Livia George came in to clean up the glass, the spilled sand, the beer-stein fragments, and the dirt from the overturned geranium pot. The West Bank had survived. Nor was the cost to my insurance company going to be exorbitant. My premiums would not go up. In only another day or two, I could open for business again.

At Paradise Farm, two men from Southern Bell showed up to repair the telephone lines cut by the cross burners. Law-enforcement officers from Tocqueville and agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation poured into Beulah Fork to examine the restaurant, the softball field at the elementary school, and the abandoned brick kiln on Cleve Snyder’s property. They used helicopters as well as cars. Because Craig Puddicombe had apparently left Hothlepoya County, maybe even Georgia, a description of both him and E. L. Teavers’s pickup truck went out to every sheriff’s department and highway patrol unit in the Southeast. Zubowicz and Nollinger told their stories to investigators at City Hall. RuthClaire and I unburdened ourselves to agents who had driven out to Paradise Farm. It rained all morning, a slow, muggy drizzle that did not alleviate the heat, but, by two o’clock that same afternoon, a GBI man telephoned RuthClaire to inform her that his agency had just made four arrests.

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

“I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

“We’d like a detailed run-through of everything that happened while you and Mr. Loyd were… hostages. It might prove helpful both in apprehending Puddicombe and in prosecuting the Klanners who didn’t stick around for… well, for the final bit of dirty work,” the agent concluded apologetically.

A reprise of the nightmare, I thought. Just what RuthClaire needs.

“Sure,” she said. “When?”

“Niedrach and Davison are with you now, aren’t they? Okay, good. They’ll drive you and Mr. Loyd over there in twenty or thirty minutes.”

The drizzle became a steady downpour. As we rode to the brick kiln with agents Niedrach and Davison, a weather report on the car radio attributed the rain to a fizzled hurricane off the Louisiana coast. Happy McElroy Country, I thought. I hoped fervently that the storm had had enough fury to cripple—for a day or two—the broadcasting towers of the Greater Christian Constituency of America in Rehoboth, Louisiana. My mood was vengeful, and sour. The agents in front murmured to each other like adults outside a room in which children are napping.

At the brick kiln, we parked and waited for the rain to subside. Our driver, Niedrach, kept the engine running and the air conditioner going; otherwise we would have all succumbed to the humid heat. Looking through the rain-beaded window beside me, I saw Brian Nollinger standing near the mound whose gullet had engulfed Teavers and Adam. He had ridden out from Beulah Fork with another pair of investigators. They were still in their car, however, whereas Nollinger was listing in the deluge like a bamboo flagpole, his granny glasses impossibly steamed, his Fu Manchu dripping, dripping, dripping.

I cracked my window. “What the hell are you doing here?” I shouted.

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

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

Even so, Nollinger was martyring himself to his alleged bereavement, turning aside from us to squat like a pilgrim at the base of the mound. Maybe, I thought, he does feel something like grief for Adam… along with a more painful grief for his lost opportunities. The sight of him hunkering in the rain annoyed me as much as it did RuthClaire. But some of the shame and embarrassment I felt for the anthropologist was shame and embarrassment for Paul Loyd. If I had not gone to him in February, Adam might still be alive….

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

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

I flinched at this word. The GBI had confirmed the validity of RuthClaire’s marriage to Adam, and its agents were careful to call her by her legal married name. Mrs. Montaraz gave me an unreadable but far from timid glance.

The rain slowed and then stopped. The pecan trees and blackberry thickets began to drip-dry. The ruddy mud around the mounds meant treacherous footing, but Niedrach determined that if we did not mind dirtying our shoes, we could begin the reenactment. He would play Teavers’s part, Davison would be Puddicombe, and Nollinger would impersonate Adam.

RuthClaire vetoed this idea. Nollinger must sit in the other car while the agent who’d driven him out here took Adam’s role. Niedrach accepted the substitution, and under a cloud cover fissuring like the crust of an oven-bound blueberry pie, we rehearsed in minute detail what had already happened. “Teavers” and “Adam” were careful not to get too near the open vat, but RuthClaire began quietly crying, anyway. She shook off Niedrach’s offer of a break or a postponement, and we concluded the exercise in twenty minutes, with pauses for photographs and ratiocinative conjecture. Sunshine, suddenly, lay on the wet red clay like a coat of shellac. We milled around, unwilling to leave. The spot had a queer attraction, like a graveyard or the ruins of a Roman aqueduct.

Then, from some distance off, we heard a wordless crooning, a cappella. The melody was that of a church hymn, one I remembered from long-ago Sundays wedged in a Congregationalist pew between my mother and an older brother with a case of fidgets as acute as my own: “This Is My Father’s World.” The crooning had a reverberant quality that sent chills through my system—in spite of the stifling July mugginess. RuthClaire, Nollinger, the GBI agents, and I froze in our places. Bewildered, we looked from face to face. The crooning ceased, giving way to a half dozen or more sharp expulsions of breath, then resumed again with an eeriness that unnerved me.

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

“Watch it!” Niedrach cautioned her.

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

A beat. Two beats.

Adam’s head popped out of view again.

“ Adam !” RuthClaire wailed.

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