Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

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.