Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

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.”