Michael Bishop: Ancient of Days

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Put yourself in my place, Mr. Loyd. It’s a bit like hearing a dinosaur’s been seen wading in the Chattahoochee.”

“I’m not a crackpot, Dr. Nollinger. I’m a respected businessman with no history of mental illness or unprofitable undertakings. My wife—my ex-wife, I mean—is a painter of national repute. Should anything happen to her because you’ve refused to look into the matter, well, the world of art will have suffered a loss as great as that about to befall the world of science. It’s your conscience, Dr. Nollinger. Can you live with the consequences of such a reprehensible dereliction of duty?” I rose to leave.

Stroking his Fu Manchu, Dr. Nollinger said, “Mr. Loyd, after two or three years as a researcher, every competent scientist develops a nose for crackpots.”

“Go on.”

“You came in like a crackpot, with the identifying minatory zeal and traditional combative cast in your eye.” He paused. “But you don’t talk like a crackpot. You talk like a man who’s bewildered by something he doesn’t know how to deal with.”

“Bingo,” I said.

“I don’t think you’re making this up, sir. That would require some imagination.” He smiled. “So I’ll help you out.” He stopped smiling. “On one condition.”

“I’m listening.”

“Send me a photo or two—all you can—of this dispossessed specimen of Homo habilis . Use an Instamatic or a Polaroid and get me some proof. I don’t like wild-goose chases, particularly to backwaters like Beulah Fork.”

“You got it,” I said.

I walked back to the parking lot past a dozen communities of gorillas, orangutans, pygmy chimps, rhesus monkeys, and bespectacled primatologists, all equally inscrutable in their obsessive mind-sets and desires. We are fam-i-lee , go the lyrics of a recent popular song, but in my entire life I recall feeling close—spiritually close—to only one other living creature, and that is my lovely lost RuthClaire. Why had she taken up with a man-ape when my poor human soul still longed for union with hers?

To get a photograph of Adam, I had to sneak out to Paradise Farm in violation of a legal promise to RuthClaire. I had to prowl around the house in the numbing winter dark. Fortunately, no dog patrols the property (otherwise, even Adam would not have been able to sneak into its pecan grove), and I climbed into a magnolia tree near the downstairs bathroom without betraying my presence. I had neither an Instamatic nor a Polaroid, but an expensive Minolta with both a telephoto lens and a pack of high-speed film for shooting in dim or almost nonexistent light.

Voyeurism is not ordinarily one of my vices, but when RuthClaire came into the lavatory that evening to bathe, I trembled. The waxy brown leaves of the magnolia tree clicked like castanets, mimicking the effects of a brutal winter wind. I looked , let me confess, but I did not take RuthClaire’s picture. (The only extant print of her bewitching unclad body is the one still burning in my mind.) When she lifted herself clear of the sunken bath, patted her body dry with a lavender towel, and disappeared from my sight like a nymph, I nearly swooned. Each of these three near-swoons was a metaphysical orgasm of the highest order. It had been a long, long time.

The bathroom light went out, and a real easterly wind began to blow, surging through the pecan grove from Alabama. I clung to my perch. Adam and I, it seemed, had traded places. The strangeness of this reversal did not amuse me. The luminous digits on my watch registered 9:48. What if my habiline rival habitually relieved himself in the woods? What if, even in winter, he bathed in White Cow Creek? If so, he would never enter this bathroom, and I’d never get his photo. Dr. Nollinger would dismiss me as a screwball of the most annoying sort. I had made a mistake.

At 11:04 P.M., though, Adam entered the big tiled bathroom. He wore the bottoms of a suit of long thermal underwear and carried what looked like the carcass of a squirrel. He climbed down into the sunken bath, where, after turning on a heavy flow of water, he proceeded to rend and devour the dead rodent. He did this with skill and gusto. I used up all my film taking pictures of the process—whereupon I heaved my own dinner into the shrubbery beneath the magnolia tree.

Turnabout, they say, is fair play….

Later, I sent Brian Nollinger duplicates of the developed photographs and a letter attesting to their authenticity. I added a P.S.: “The ball’s in your court, Doc.”

The anthropology professor was one of those urban people who refuse to own an automobile. He got around the Emory campus on foot or bicycle, and he bummed rides to the Yerkes field station with whichever of his colleagues happened to be going that way. In the middle of March, he arrived in Beulah Fork on a Greyhound bus, and I met him in front of Ben Sadler’s hole-in-the-wall laundry (known locally as the Greyhound Depot Laundry) on Main Street. After introducing Nollinger to Ben (dry cleaner and ticket agent nonpareil) as my nephew, I led the newcomer across the street to the West Bank, where, for over a year, I had lived in the upstairs storage room and taken all my meals in the restaurant proper. Although I could have easily afforded to build a house of my own, or at least to rent a vacation chalet near Muscadine Gardens, I refused to do so in the dogged expectation that RuthClaire and I would eventually reunite at Paradise Farm.

“Take me out there,” Nollinger said over a cold Budweiser in the empty dining area late that afternoon.

“I’d have to call first. And if I tell her why we want to come, she’ll hang up.”

My “nephew” fanned his photos of Adam out across the maroon tablecloth. “You didn’t have an invitation to take these, Mr. Loyd. Why so prim and proper now?”

“My unscrupulosity has well-defined limits.”

Nollinger sniggered. Then he tapped one of the prints. “Adam, as your ex-wife calls the creature, is definitely a protohuman. Even though I’m a primate ethologist and physical anthropologist, not a hotshot fossil finder like the Leakeys or A. Patrick Blair, I’d stake my reputation on it.” He reconsidered. “I mean, I’d establish my reputation with a demonstration of that claim. Adam is a living specimen of the hominid Homo habilis or Homo zarakalensis , depending on which ‘expert’ you consult. In any case, your wife has no right to keep her amazing friend cloistered away incognito on Paradise Farm.”

“That’s what I’ve always thought. Edna Twiggs is bound to find out sooner or later, and RuthClaire’ll have hell to pay in Beulah Fork.”

“Mr. Loyd, your wife’s foremost obligation is to advance our knowledge about human origins.”

“That’s a narrow way of looking at it. She also has her reputation to consider.”

“Sir, haven’t you once wondered how a prehistoric hominid happened to show up in a pecan grove in western Georgia?”

“A condor dropped him. A circus train derailed. I don’t care, Dr. Nollinger. What’s pertinent to me is his presence out there, not the weird particulars of his arrival.”

“All right, but I think I know how he got here.”

We each had another beer. My visitor sipped moodily at his while I explained that the best approach to RuthClaire might be Nollinger’s masquerading as a meter reader for Georgia Power. While ostensibly recording her kilowattage, he could plead a sudden indisposition and ask to use the bathroom or lie down on the sofa. RuthClaire was a sucker for honest working people in distress, and Nollinger could buy a shirt and trousers similar to those worn by Georgia Power employees at Plunkett Bros. General Store right here in town. Once he got into the house, who could say what might happen? Maybe RuthClaire would introduce him to her hirsute boarder and a profitable rapport spring up between the habiline and the anthropologist. Twirling the silver-blond twists of his almost invisible Fu Manchu, Nollinger only grunted.