Michael Bishop: Ancient of Days

I turned toward the kitchen. Livia George Stephens, my chief assistant cook, was leaning against the flocked metal divider separating the cashier’s station from the dining area. I had given Molly Kingsbury, Hazel Upchurch, and my two regular waitresses the night off. Livia George constituted my entire staff. One hand rubbing the back of the other, she was sizing up our customers with a mock shrewdness that was genuinely shrewd.

“Good to see you, Miss RuthClaire,” she said aloud. “Looks like you brought in a friend with some spirit in his bones. Give me a chanzt, I’ll put some meat on ’em.”

“This is Adam,” my ex replied. “He’d say hello, but he’s mute. I’m sure he’s as pleased to meet you as I am to see you again. I hope Paul’s behaving himself for you.”

Livia George tiptoed around this pleasantry. “Where’s he stay?” She nodded at Adam. “I ain’ never seen him ’roun’ here befoah, and I know mos’ evverbody in this part of ’Poya County.”

“Livia George,” I said, “they’re here to eat, not to chitchat. Why don’t you go see about getting ready for them.”

“Nothin’ I can do till I know what they like, Mr. Paul. You wan’ me to start cookin’ befoah they put in a order?”

“I want you to get into the goddamn kitchen!”

Sullenly, her hips moving like corroded pistons, she went. When she had gone, I strode over to the table to pour out the water and to recite our menu items rather than to present them in a printed folder. For RuthClaire, I recommended sautéed mushrooms, an eggplant dish, steamed pearl potatoes, a spinach salad, and a Cheddar soufflé with diced bell peppers and chives. For her tag-along escort, I suggested broiled liver and onions. Side orders of unsalted peanuts and warm egg whites would set off this entrée nicely, and he could wash it all down with a snifter of branch water and branch water.

“I’ll have just what you recommend,” RuthClaire said. “Bring Adam the same and no bully-boy surprises. Water’s all we want to drink, pure Beulah Fork spring water.”

Although I followed RuthClaire’s instructions, the dinner was a disaster. Adam ate everything with his spoon. He bolted every bite, and when he didn’t like something—the eggplant au gratin, for instance—he tried to pile it up in the middle of the table like a deliquescent cairn. For this bit of creative gaucherie, he at first used his hands rather than his spoon, and he burned himself. Later, when the food had cooled, he finished the eggplant monument. Nothing RuthClaire said or did to discourage this project had any effect, and you could not keep from looking at this new centerpiece unless you let your eye stray to Adam himself. A flake of spinach gleamed in his mustache, ten or twelve pearl potatoes bulged out his cheeks, and he nonchalantly poured his ice cubes into the cheese soufflé.

“This is his first time in a public restaurant,” RuthClaire acknowledged.

“And his last, too, if I have anything to say about it.”

My ex only laughed. “He’s doing pretty well. You should’ve seen the food fights we had out at Paradise Farm only a month or two ago.”

“Yeah. Sorry I missed them.”

She thinks she’s Pygmalion, I marveled. She thinks she can carve a dapper southern gentleman out of inchoate Early Pleistocene clay. Well, I loved the lady for the delusions she had formed.

Unhappily, it got worse. For dessert RuthClaire ordered them each a Nesselrode pudding, one of the West Bank’s specialities and major attractions. Adam lifted the dish to his mouth and began eating of this delicacy like a dog devouring Alpo. After a few such bites, however, his head came up, his cheeks began to puff in and out like those of a blowfish, and he vomited all over the table. Guttural gasps of dismay or amazement escaped him between geysers, and in four or five minutes he had divested himself of his entire dinner and whatever else he may have eaten earlier that day. RuthClaire tried to comfort him. She wiped his mouth with a wetted napkin and stroked his furry nape with her fingers. Never before had a patron of the West Bank upchucked the extraordinary cuisine prepared in my kitchen, though, and I may have been more in need of comforting than was RuthClaire’s ill-bred habiline.

“Get him to the rest room!” I cried, much too late to save either the tablecloth or my equanimity. “If nothing else, get him to the goddamn street!”

“He isn’t used to such fare. I’ll clean it up, Paul. Just leave it to me, okay?”

“He isn’t worthy of it, you mean! It’s like feeding caviar to a crocodile, filet mignon to a high school fullback!”

“Hush, Paul, I said I’d take care of the mess, and I will.”

Livia George helped her, however, and when RuthClaire left later that night, she placed three one-hundred-dollar bills next to the cash register. For the remainder of that week, the West Bank reeked of commercial disinfectant and a faint monkey-house odor that no one but me (thank God) appeared to detect.

“She’s living with it,” I told the young man sitting at the cluttered desk, his hands behind his head and his naked elbows protruding like chicken wings. “She’s been living with it since October.”

“Times have changed, Mr. Loyd. Live and let live.”

“It’s not another man, Dr. Nollinger. It’s male, I mean, but it’s not, uh, human. It’s a variety of upright ape.”

“A hominid?”

“That’s RuthClaire’s word for it. Hominid, habiline. A prehistoric primate, for God’s sake. So I drove all the way up here to talk to somebody who might be interested.”

“You could have telephoned, Mr. Loyd. Telephoning might have saved us both a good deal of time.”

“Beulah Fork’s a small town, Dr. Nollinger. A very small town. You can’t direct-dial without Edna Twiggs horning in to say she’ll patch you through. Then she hangs on to eavesdrop and sniffle. Times may have changed, but bestial cohabitation’s still a mite too strong for Hothlepoya Countians. You understand me, don’t you?”

“A habiline?”

“I want you to get it out of there. It may be dangerous. It’s certainly uncouth. It doesn’t belong on Paradise Farm.”

Brian Nollinger dropped his hands into his lap and squeaked his swivel chair around toward his office’s only window. A thin man in his early thirties, he wore scuffed cowboy boots, beige corduroy trousers, a short-sleeved Madras shirt with a button-down collar, wire-rimmed glasses, and a wispy Fu Manchu mustache with an incongruous GI haircut. Outside his window, a family of stub-tailed macaques huddled in the feeble winter sun in a fenced-in exercise area belonging to this secluded rural field station of the Yerkes Primate Center, ten or twelve miles north of Atlanta. Nollinger was an associate professor of anthropology at Emory University, but a government grant to study the effects of forced addiction to certain amphetamines on a representative primate species had given him an office at the field station and experimental access to the twenty-odd motley monkeys presently taking the February sun beside their heated trailer. They looked wide-awake and fidgety, these monkeys—“hypervigilant,” to use Nollinger’s own word. Given the nature of his study, I wasn’t greatly surprised.

“Why don’t you write Richard Leakey or Alistair Patrick Blair or one of the other African paleoanthropologists specializing in ‘prehistoric hominids’?” Nollinger asked. “They’d jump at the chance to take a living fossil off Ms. Loyd’s hands. A find like that would secure a young scientist’s fortune and reputation forever. Leakey and Blair would just become bigger.”

“Aren’t you interested in fame and fortune?”

“In modest doses, sure.” He refused to look at me. He was staring at a lithograph of an Ishasha River baboon in twelve different baboonish postures, from a grooming stance to a cautious stroll through tall East African grass.