by Jerry
I could do as well or better at the reference room of U North but Prof lives just down the road. Besides, he keeps a supply of cool Canadian ale. I also like his library. I call it a library; it’s more like the den of a domesticated animal, littered with back copies of newspapers and magazines he has not yet read, letters he means to answer, rocks he’s picked up, catalogs, circulars, theater programs, marmalade crocks full of fountain pens and books, books, books.
The books hide the walls. They’re in piles on tables and heaps on the floor. They sprawl across his desk. They sit in unopened cartons from publishers and mail-order remainder houses. He’s forever trying to make more room for them and keep them in some sort of order. He has categories—history, geography, religion, North Country, word origins—I once counted 74 dictionaries—but the categories expand and the books within them grow, and it’s a losing battle.
Prof has his own filing system. Say he clips a newspaper story on spelunking. It goes into the back or front of an appropriate book, such as “Underground Empire,” Clay Perry’s fine work on cave exploring in New York. Some of his books bulge so with clippings that their bindings have begun to crack. I chide him about this but he replies that he owns the books; they don’t own him. Nobody owns him. Years ago he retired young and well off from public relations work. He’s a bachelor.
I went to see Prof about prehistoric man. He pretended I’d come to play chess and got out the board. I lost track of how many games we played and, more particularly, how much ale I had drunk. At home later I woke from a nightmarish replay of our evening.
Prof had taken me from one topic to another. When he got to ancient man, one of his favorites, I kept him on it and he grew expansive, jumping up to pluck a book or magazine from his shelves, showing me this reference or that, pointing to a clipping that served as a bookmark, or to a pencil note in a margin sourced to a broadcast. Thrown at me that way, it seemed overwhelming evidence that we were johnnies come lately to our planet.
That part of the evening had been real. I was sure the two of us had talked of each of these things, had examined each marked paragraph or footnote or clipping or note, and that I could go back to Prof’s house tonight and see each of them again.
But in the nightmare replay there were three of us. Pirt was there too, sitting like a precocious, indulged child on the edge of Profs fifteenth century sideboard, his feet dangling, punctuating our talk with personal comments. He was eating an orange, careless of how juice squirted on the furniture. When I remonstrated with him Prof said, “It’s the same as lemon oil. Nourishes the wood. Sandia man, now, was a comparative newcomer . . .”
“My nephew,” Pirt said. “Solomon Sandia, son of the chief camel-tender of the great southwest.”
Prof: “Minnesota man, however, was really a 15-year-old girl.”
Pirt: “Was she my cousin Lucy? She’d be hurt if we forgot her.”
Prof: “A great sea once lapped the shores that are North Arabia’s hills.”
Pirt: “I swam in that sea—floated, drifted, evolving, not sure what form I would take when I crawled out to sun myself dry.”
Prof: “There’s a note here about archaeopteryx, the oldest known bird.”
Pirt: “Once I thought I’d like to be a bird . . .”
Prof: “Amphioxus lived on sandy beaches. Wormlike. A brain of sorts but no cranium.”
Pirt: “But I had to crawl before I could fly.”
Prof: “Bryozoa . . . Australopithecine . . .”
Pirt: “That’s me. Graceful, fleet of foot.”
Prof: “Homo habilis. You had to kill to survive.”
Pirt: “lam one with them all, wherever and whenever they were. I alone survived. I was taken when they were young and have returned still young when they are millennia old. I am both the first and the last man but a child still.
“I was kept in an extraterrestrial limbo, suspended beyond the moon but closer than the stars. They visited from time to time, dutifully imparting knowledge, but said little of their plan for me. I think they lost sight of it as they lived and died, bequeathing their responsibilities to others who carried on by rote and tradition.
“I was returned to a changed Earth. An obeah woman saw that I was adopted by a Hispanic mother who’d lost a son my age. My foster mother, a widow, was always wary of changeling me. She was glad when the obeah woman placed me among kids who were going north from the ghetto to the land of my natural childhood.”
I wanted to ask a question but Prof motioned me to silence. Pirt, or whatever he was, went on, talking to me: “I knew I was home when I found the ancient rocks overlooking the vanished sea. I remembered how it had been. A low haze was like the surface of the long-gone waters. A distant airplane soared like a pteranodon in the unchanging vastness of sky.”
In that dreamy dialog I thought I heard Prof observe: “Man and mammoth did not mix.”
But from Pirt, less a reply than a voicing of yearnings recalled. “Creatures of the upper air. My imaginary friends.”
Pirt swabbed a dribble of orange with a hairy arm and smiled at me. “You wondered why I stole away from your house so often. I went to where I’d lived long ago. It was less strange there and after a while I could come home again to you and Tally, and know your warmth. So much the same and yet different—no animal skins now or rocky cave; no oil heat then or faggot fire now.
“But my love for you is what I felt then! The glow of belonging. Must I leave again? Am I only a slum kid you shelter in obligation to a charity? I want to be wanted here. This is my land and these are my people no matter how much has changed. Have I changed? Am I not the kid I once was, the boy you and Tally never had?
“Don’t let me go back to that place between worlds. Please help me—keep me. Don’t let them take me. Please keep me; help me. Please . . .”
I awoke, my mouth dry and blood pounding at my temples. Too much ale? Too much Pirt? I got up carefully, not to disturb Tally. It was quarter to five. I went to the bathroom and washed down aspirin with two glasses of water.
I went to Pirt’s room. He wasn’t there or anywhere in the house. I stumbled back to bed. I slept.
An ice-age creature, naked and hair-covered but recognizable as Pirt, was pursued across snowy wastes by someone all in white on a modern snowmobile. The rider was brandishing a spear gun. The machine was silent. The only sound was the crunch of the caveman’s feet as he ran with incredible speed across the crusted snow.
I awoke in a sweat, aware that I’d been rooting for the Snowmobile Rider.
There really was a Snowmobile Rider.
Our area has no real caves for the returning caveman. We don’t have the soft rocks that water cuts through so well. We do have some artificial caves. The talc mine near Edwards. Some abortive diggings farther north, left by the geologists who’d come during World War II, looking for sources of sulfuric acid.
Then there’s the area known as North Arabia deep in the wilderness that’s left blank on topographic maps. Somebody owned it years ago but it’s reverted since to state land. There’s the mouth of a cave in North Arabia that some say is connected to Sunday Rock. Some say that cave is the secret home of a favorite North Country legend, the Phantom Snowmobile Rider. Some say. Legends abound and history gets twisted.
But the Phantom Snowmobile Rider is too well documented to have been legend alone. He rode only at night but was seen the year round. I suppose the vehicle he used in the warm months should have had another name but everybody called it a snowmobile, in season and out. He dressed all in white, the color of his machine. In the winter he wore fur gloves and boots and what seemed to be a white nylon snowsuit. A helmet masked his face. A long white scarf trailed behind him as if he were piloting a Spad over France in World War I.
An eerie thing was the silence of his machine. Some said he was a professor of mechanical engineering at U North who had perfected a noiseless engine. He took his invention to the General Motors people at Roosevelttown, but they wouldn’t listen
to him. So he went back to his lab one night with a U-Haul and removed the equipment he’d built for his experiments. He vanished into the wilderness past Sunday Rock, where it was said he built an underground laboratory.
Legends grow when facts are few. Myths die hard if people want to believe them. A friend of mine in U North’s academic affairs office recalled an associate professor of mechanical engineering whose specialty was internal combustion engines. He’d left several years ago to be chairman of a department at a land-grant university in the midwest and was still there.
Nevertheless we had a Snowmobile Rider. Too many people had seen him for anyone to doubt it. My friend Bob Kenzie the fire watcher saw him from his tower atop Mount Eyrie. “He must have been doing forty-five, silent as the wind,” Bob said. “He came out of a copse into the open and did big figure-eights on the flat land where Northern Stone has mineral rights. Then he got into rough country and I had only glimpses of him through the trees. Saw him rear up and leap a gully fifteen feet across. I went and measured it the next day.”
Joe, a trapper friend, told me he went out drunk one night and got caught in one of his own traps. He fainted or passed out. When he came to he was free and there were snowmobile tracks coming and going. I tend to discount this, even though Joe showed me the cuts on his foot.
A more reliable witness was Trooper Sam Medicis of the State Police. He was going south along the part of Route 56 that we call the Prairie because it’s so straight and flat. He was hitting 90 when the Snowmobile Rider came from behind him and passed him, raising a white glove in salute and going out of sight. Maybe Sam exaggerated his speed—he’s proud of his youthful laurels as a stock car racer—but I don’t doubt that he saw the Rider.
It was wrong of Tally to have tried to keep the fawn, of course. It had limped in, hurt, to the field behind the barn and certainly the first thing she should have done was call the conservation officer. Instead she tried to comfort it and bind up its wound. Even that was okay.
But then Tally began to make a pet of it, and that was wrong. Maybe it was in her heritage—her grandmother had been a girl in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings country. “The Yearling” and all that.
At any rate she fed it and put it in the barn for overnight. She stayed with it until late, making sure there was no way it could get out and hurt itself again, or be attacked, then went to bed.
Who knows what happened? Pirt had been out late, too, on one of his prowls in the dead sea bottoms that haunted his thinking. He was returning home, probably after reliving the life of an ancestral hunter, when he heard a noise in the barn. And when he opened the door and the fawn ran out it wasn’t our Pirt but a caveman from thousands of years ago who leapt on it and killed it, never mind how.
Probably that’s the way it happened. Pirt really wasn’t to blame. But of course he shouldn’t have cut off the fawn’s tail and taken it to his bed, where Tally found it in the morning.
A thing that happened was the Long Noon. The Book of Joshua tells us the sun stayed in the midst of heaven and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day. There have been long hot days in our village but none like that particular time.
Some of us at the station go out at noon and seek a cool spot. On this particular day I took a sandwich and a cold soda to the shade of a tree on a bank of the river that divides our village. It’s the same river that Pirt felt sorry for, only lower down. I had a book with me and dozed over it after eating. I looked up with a start, fearing I’d overstayed the lunch hour, but was reassured by the position of the sun. From my usual comfortable place against an old oak I knew I needn’t start back until the sun reached a point behind the top of a tall poplar on the opposite bank.
Again I dozed, lulled by the murmur of the river and the warmth of the day.
People came and talked to me in the Long Noon. Prof came. “Pirt’s a scout,” he said.
“A boy scout?” I asked.
“Would that he were. No, I suspect he’s the advance man for an expedition of aliens.”
“Aliens? You mean like—?”
“Extraterrestrials, right. Or at least people who left Earth a long time ago and have now come back for another look.”
“But why a kid like Pirt?” I asked. “And why send him here?”
“We know Pirt isn’t as young as he pretends. And I think there’s a clue in the anorthosite.”
“Anorthosite?”
I remembered. We had made our way into the international news when two astronauts went moonwalking and found anorthosite up there. It was only a small detail of the Apollo 15 flight but was big news here in the North Country, one of the few places on Earth where anorthosite is found. Dave Scott was in a crater called Spur, on the Appenine Front, when he found a chunk of the rock. The astronauts had been looking for it, apparently.
Prof called my attention to the fact that anorthosite carries in it the word north. Specialists had told us on TV that the rock conceivably dated back four billion and some years to the beginning of the solar system.
Prof sounded professorial: “The anorthosite massif in the Adirondacks once lay under 20 miles of other rock. It has been described as a subterranean layer two miles thick atop two huge pillars. Hard-rock geologists prefer not to speculate but to at least one old Adirondack hand this summons up the picture of a capstone and its supports at Stonehenge, but deep in the earth and millennia more ancient.
“And when a sober-sided science encyclopia in its article on anorthosite refers enigmatically to ‘very curious circumstances’ we laymen have a right to wonder . . .”
Pirt replaced Prof there beside me in the Long Noon.
“Are you four billion years old?” I asked him.
“Are you kidding?” he said. “That’s when things began, not people.”
“But you’re more than ten thousand years old. You didn’t just come over on the land bridge.”
“I’m no child,” he said.
“Of course not. How old are you really?”
But Pirt wandered off.
Phantom friends keep coming through;
I have a sense of déjà vu . . .
Loretta LaJoie was there in the Long Noon. I’d never seen Loretta, only spoken on the telephone, but I recognized her there.
“One of the astronauts called it Genesis Rock,” Loretta said. “That was James Irwin. He said they found it with God’s help.”
Loretta LaJoie also said she liked Pirt better than those other cavemen, B.C. and Alley Oop.
The Phantom Snowmobile Rider came and talked to me there in the Long Noon: “Up with a roar and over the hill and down. Then coasting, seeking the dark spot that is the entrance to the cave that only I have found. Then into it, lights now on as I navigate the turns I know so well but which another would fail to find. I’ve lost the pursuers, whether on my tail or scientifically seeking me out. I am safe in my burrow here in the cavern where it is always 50 degrees fahrenheit.””
“. . . Ulusions like the flight of time . . .”
Busky Kimp drove onto the grass in a pickup truck. It was loaded—fog lights, running lights, spotlight, flashers, roll bar, tow bar, air horn, gun racks but no guns, CB radio, buggy-whip antenna, oversize all-terrain tires, spoke wheels, helper springs, wide cab, running board, racing stripe.
The pickup was brand new but he said he hadn’t bought it. “It’s a lulu,” he told me.
I said it certainly was.
“I mean the Awaiters provided me with it in lieu of salary,” Busky said. “In lieu of. That’s what they call in
Albany a lulu.” He knew I knew that; he wanted me to know he was in solid with the Awaiters.
I gave him the satisfaction. “It’s very nice for you.”
“She’s the sweetest little vehicle I ever did see,” he said. I saw nothing little about her. “She’ll take you anywhere you want to go.”
Busky drove off, silent like the Snowmobile Rider.
A reverie stole over me. I checked the position of the su
n behind the poplar. All was hot and still.
. . . ancestral memories of incandescent ooze . . .
Pirt drifted past but did not look at me or speak. I imagined a marvelous device, a kind of lingualog or oral diary that enabled me to hear the voice in which he thought.
“Damn the hair! If I were ten years older I could be a freak, a youth-cultist, and let it grow. But I look too young to pass. So I hide in the bathroom and pretend to take long showers while I depilate myself . . .
“I have to keep reminding myself that I’m not seven or nine or 12 years old, that I’m an adult on a mission and must reject terrestrial influences. But they do get to me. Sometimes I’m carried away in my role of a kid in the country.
“I go to the Place Between with loathing and yearning. It’s fascinating and depressing. Yet it calls me irresistibly. It’s like going home again, even if the only one to greet me is a lone pteranodon that floats lazily in the sky and looks at me only to reject me as inedible.
“I’m the forgotten man when I go back. Nobody there but little misfit me, little sport, little mutant out of his time.
“I walk the beaches between sea and land, the divider between what was and what will be. I’m the tie that binds the primordial past to the putative future where I’m to play an unlearned role.
“Where do I belong? The dichotomy—trichotomy—gets me. Am I the simple savage—basket weaver, mound builder, tool maker, cousin to Miss Minnesota Man? Am I the Ghetto Kid savoring simple country pleasures? Or am I the emissary of a race as advanced, proportionately, as Mac is to my beachwalking self?”
Pirt’s words faded. I roused myself and looked at my watch. It showed ten past two. But the positions of the sun and the poplar were unchanged. Was this reality?
There was another voice but no shape went with it. “Be of good cheer,” it said. “As Socrates urged Meno, try to recollect what you do not remember.” How could I do that?