Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

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

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

“Why don’t you just shut up?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Hear, hear!” everyone cried.

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

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.”