No Enemy But Time

by Michael Bishop

  Finally, averting her eyes from the child, Jeannette permitted Hugo to lead her back to bed.

  * * *

  The next day she took John-John for a walk through several old neighborhoods to Anna’s elementary school, where the girl was a first-grader. The playground here was a sloping gravel lot, sparsely tufted with grass and cockleburs, enclosed on three sides by a hurricane fence and on the east by the school itself. They left the stroller at home now, and John-John, so eager was he to see the children at recess, trotted the whole last block. Bundled in a nylon parka and a pair of blue corduroy pants, he reminded Jeannette of a penguin sashaying across an ice field. No ice, though; just thousands upon thousands of crinkly fallen leaves. These whirled around him as he ran.

  They reached the softball backstop and the solitary set of bleachers at the west end of the playground. John-John waddled to the fence just as a fourth- or fifth-grade boy came running up to retrieve a foul tip, and Jeannette sat down on the first bleacher level.

  “Hi,” the boy said, speaking over John-John’s head to Jeannette. “He’s cute. What’s his name?”

  Jeannette told him. Almost a year after Kennedy’s assassination, in the middle of Kansas, her son’s name had no special significance for the boy.

  “Is he yours?”

  “Mine and my husband’s. He’s Anna Monegal’s little brother. Do you know Anna?”

  “No.” The boy let John-John hold the softball through the fence. When John-John dropped it, the boy picked it up and returned it to his hands. “You like this softball, fella? Do you? One of these days you’ll be some player, I bet.”

  John-John pinned the ball against the other side of the backstop.

  “Don’t he talk yet?” The boy’s teammates were demanding that he return the ball, but he ignored them. When Jeannette confessed that John-John had not begun to talk yet, he said, “You talk to him, don’t you?”

  “All the time.”

  “Do you read to him, too? Read aloud, I mean.”

  Who was this kid, anyway? The Grand Inquisitor? “He’s a little young for that yet. We look at picture books together, though.”

  “Throw us the ball, Donnie! Throw the stupid ball!”

  Donnie gently removed the ball from John-John’s hands, whirled about and threw it wildly into the infield. Then, turning back to Jeannette, he said, “You ought to read to him out of real books. He’ll listen to you. That’s what my mother used to do with me, even before I could talk. The whole first year after I was born she used to read me ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’ every night. I could say the whole poem—every line—before I even went to school,” he bragged.

  “You like poetry, huh?”

  “Come on, Donnie! Hurry up!”

  “Not so much. I don’t know what it means, a lot. I can say it, but I still don’t know what it means. I like softball better.” Through the fence he gave John-John an amiable poke in the gut. “ ’Bye. Nice to meetcha, John-John.”

  He sauntered off. John-John remained at the fence, hypnotized by the activity. Jeannette, her hands in her coat pockets, searched the playground for Anna, but could not find her before the bell signaling the end of recess sent the school’s entire student population scrambling up the slope toward the building.

  * * *

  On impulse she led John-John up the leaf-strewn sidewalk, past the school, and eventually into a low-income housing development with a single unpaved road dead-ending on the edge of an open field. Eight miles away, over a rolling stretch of prairie dotted with cottonwoods, lay Udall, Kansas. The blacktop from Wichita, Highway 15, cut a clean diagonal toward that almost mythical little town. During Jeannette’s senior year in high school, nine years ago, a tornado had completely flattened Udall, killing more than sixty people and distributing kaboodles of outlandish debris all over the countryside.

  As they walked into the open field, Jeannette told John-John the story. She embellished the account with colorful details. The farmer who had described the twister as sounding like a thousand jets and looking like a big oil slush. The telephone operator who had died at her switchboard. The man who had been thrown up a tree alive. John-John, his mother noted, appeared to be hanging on every word, as if she were promulgating some obvious but deliciously entertaining lie. Too, the rhythms of her voice had seduced him.

  “Today that town looks one-hundred-percent, brand-spanking new,” she concluded. “You’d never know it had once been wiped off the map as surely as Neanderthals and woolly mammoths.”

  They stood in the autumn turkey grass together, silent again. A meadowlark flew up from the ground cover, inscribed a parabola on the pale October sky. Jeannette began to feel vulnerable, exposed, as if their uprightness in this place invited either ridicule from the conventional folks in the houses behind them or attack from the cavemen and pachyderms hidden in the bushes beyond the arroyo dividing this small expanse of cow pasture. Crazy thoughts, but the wind was blowing and the world seemed big and hostile.

  Now that her tornado story was over, John-John’s interest shifted elsewhere. He took off downhill, toward the gully. He was fast, too. To keep her dress out of the snagging thistles and shrub branches, she grabbed it up by the hem, then plunged down the meadow after him. By seizing his wrist, she halted his single-minded assault on the dry flood bed. The boy strained against her grip. He pointed and made unintelligible noises in his throat.

  Phrygian, Hugo facetiously called these vocalizations. We’ve got a kid who speaks Phrygian. That, according to a friend of his in the library at McConnell, had once been thought the first language ever spoken by human beings.

  Beyond the arroyo were five or six white-faced heifers placidly chewing their cuds. Despite their bulk, Jeannette had not seen them until just now. Like rhinoceroses or giraffes, they were browsing on the shrubbery that had partly concealed them, stripping the year’s last leaves from their branches. It was weird, this sudden apparition of cattle. Even weirder that they were browsing rather than cropping grass. It almost seemed that John-John had summoned them into existence by pointing at them.

  “Cows,” Jeannette said distractedly. “Cows.”

  “Cao,” John-John said, still pointing.

  Startled, Jeannette knelt in front of the boy and gripped his shoulders so that she was blocking his view. “That’s right,” she said eagerly. “That’s right—cow! The word is cow!”

  He pulled to the right, not interested in his mother’s efforts to reinforce his accomplishment.

  Brushing a strand of wayward hair from her face, Jeannette stood up. Let him see the goddamn cows, for God’s sake! She felt lighthearted and proud. Phrygian, hell! Cao was English, no matter how broadly inflected. A good Anglo-Saxon English word. By uttering this single word he had vindicated her faith in his potential. Even though many children did not speak until well after their second birthday, that “feral child” business of Major so-and-so in Colonel Unger’s office had bugged her for better than a year. She had secretly begun to suspect that John-John’s unmonitored infancy in Seville had taken an insidious toll on his capacity to pick up language. This suspicion, in turn, had riddled her with guilt, because otherwise he was an alert and vivacious child.

  “Cow,” she said, laughing. “Cao, cao, cao.”

  * * *

  “I don’t believe it, mujer.”

  “It’s true—he spoke.”

  “To a herd of cows?”

  “Not to them, Hugo. He just saw them and he—”

  “He said cow, Daddy!”

  They were sitting in the kitchen at a table with a Formica top, part of the dinette set that Hugo had bought last Christmas through the McConnell Base Exchange. John-John was in an aluminum high chair with a yellow plastic tray. With a spoon in his right hand and the greasy fingers of his left, he was eating overdone hamburger granules. His mouth was smeared with mustard.

  Hugo addressed Anna with mock stateliness: “ ‘Four score and seven years ago,’ John-John told the cows, ‘our fath
ers brought forth on this continent a new nación, conceived in libertad and dedicated to—’ How does the rest of it go, niña?”

  “Daddy!”

  “He really did speak,” Jeannette insisted. “Not Phrygian, either.”

  “Then I think we should be havin’ steak instead of hamburger.” Hugo lifted a piece of hamburger patty on his fork tines. “John-John, this is cao, too. You see this? You’re eatin’ cao, Juanito, all the time eatin’ those big sleepy creatures with those big brown eyes. Say cao for me, pretty please.”

  The boy, scattering bits of hamburger on the linoleum, pointed in the direction that Jeannette had taken him on his walk that morning. Toward the elementary school. Toward Udall.

  “And at the playground a little boy named Donnie told me I ought to read to John-John—not just alphabet and picture books. Real books, difficult things. I’m going to start doing that, too.”

  “When?” Hugo asked warily.

  “Right after his bath. Why don’t you and Anna get the dishes?”

  “Why don’ I wear high heels and lipstick?” Hugo retorted. But he and Anna did what Jeannette had asked.

  Jeannette, meanwhile, supervised John-John’s bath, diapered him, shoehorned him into his terrycloth pajamas, and stood him up in his crib. He folded his arms over the crib’s top railing and watched his mother jockey a rocking chair into place beside him. Although he was old enough to climb out of the crib, Jeannette had taught him that doing so at bedtime would cost him. Two or three evenings a week he made a break for it, anyway.

  Tonight, however, Jeannette’s continued presence in his and Anna’s room kept this impulse in check. As his mother removed a garish paperback from the pocket of her sunflower-print apron, he looked on with mounting curiosity. Then Jeannette sat down in the rocking chair and opened the book and began to read: “ ‘When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton . . .’ ”

  Chapter Ten

  Fruit of the Looms

  OUR CONTINGENCY PLAN DEMANDED THAT I BE PRESENT at lakeside every sunrise and sunset for the possible extrusion of the Backstep Scaffold, a stipulation that cut down my range and frustrated my efforts to observe Helen’s people. This demand was doubly difficult to observe because the scaffold did not appear. Nevertheless, after missing my first sunrise assignation, for the entire week afterward I honored my end of the bargain and showed up at lakeside even when irritably certain that my colleagues in the twentieth century would fail me again. Still, I did not believe I was permanently stranded. Kaprow and his assistants were experiencing Technological Difficulties, bugs that they would undoubtedly overcome in time, and time was Kaprow’s private bailiwick.

  In fact, I began to believe that maybe my apprehension of time differed in some significant way from that of my White Sphinx colleagues. Maybe, because of the sheer temporal distance of my dropback, my sunrises and sunsets no longer corresponded to theirs. Eventually, I decided, Kaprow would figure that out, and the scaffold would appear—seemingly out of thin air—exactly when it was supposed to. In the meantime, though, I would abandon the lake to give the habilines my full attention, returning at the end of another week to see if I had surmised correctly. After all, getting to know the protohumans was what I had come for.

  For the next couple of days after this decision, then, I mounted dogged forays on the Minids to press my suit. They did not react well. Although they no longer tried to drive me away, they would not tolerate my presence closer than forty or fifty yards from the huts. To make me keep my distance they hurled figs, mongongo nuts, berries, tubers, clumps of dirt, and stones. I had hoped to make inroads on their concerted resistance by plying two or three of the younger habilines with sugar cubes and gum sticks from my survival gear, but the children would not let me approach them, and the mothers of the Minid teddy bears were extremely conscientious about keeping them close to hand.

  On the third morning, I arrived in the clearing between the fingers of gallery forest to find empty huts. The Minids had moved, had relocated Helensburgh elsewhere in the mosaic of interlocking East African habitats. Momentarily I panicked. I had driven them from their capital, and it might not be easy to find them again. This fear passed. The morning after I had fired my pistol into the air—the morning after I had entertained them with a soulful rendition of “A Day Ago”—the Minids had again greeted the sunrise by singing. Their wordless chorale, awakening me, had echoed over woods and veldt like the spirit of thunder or earthquake.

  To find where the Minids had relocated their village, all I would have to do was listen for their next reverent aubade. They sang, I had decided, not only to express feelings that they could not otherwise articulate, but also to inform other habiline bands of their whereabouts—not as an irrevocable claim on territory, but as a social courtesy and a means of keeping the communication channels open. In fact, I had heard faint habiline singing from the far northern shore of Lake Kiboko and also from the vicinity of Mount Tharaka to the southeast. I was certain, too, that habiline ears were much better than mine, that they apprehended these faint dawn concerts as powerful surgings of emotion. Although the singing of one habiline band probably alternated with that of another, up to now all I had been able to hear clearly were the voices of the nearby Minids. If they had not moved too far off, I would hear them singing again tomorrow. They would not sever their polyphonic alliance with others of their kind merely to be forever shut of Joshua Kampa.

  I was right.

  The next morning I heard the Minids chorusing their raw benedictions of the dawn. By following these sounds I tracked them to a site about two miles from their former encampment, where they had reestablished Helensburgh (I could not give it any other name) on a grassy hillside overlooking the vast checkerboard of savannah, thornveldt, and forest strips fronting Mount Tharaka. A citadel, this community.

  Its chief disadvantage from my point of view, and one that genuinely fretted me, was that I could not approach the new capital except by walking exposed on the open grassland below. A battlement of granite boulders partly blocked my view of the haystack hovels behind it, and there was not a tree within sixty or seventy feet. The Minids themselves were arrayed across the southwestern face of the hillside like spectators at a high-school football game, but when they caught sight of me, they scampered to their battlement and treated me to a torrent of stones and taunts.

  So. Their singing had led me to them again, but their placement on the hillside thwarted easy access, and I was no better off than I had been before their move. They had hardened their position, in fact. A cunning and fearless leopard might be able to get to them, but I never would. That most Pleistocene leopards had too fine an instinct for self-preservation to make the attempt was not lost on me, either. I returned to my headquarters feeling lower than Lake Kiboko in an epoch of protracted drought.

  * * *

  I am not going to detail here the piddling hardships I suffered (dysentery is not a pretty topic), or the dangers I passed (not all of them in my stool), or the fabulous menagerie of quadrupeds, serpents, and birds that I either befriended or ate (if not the one before the other). Nor am I going to recount my daily chores in the acacia thicket, from washing clothes to gathering firewood to burying my garbage (which last task I scrupulously performed to discourage the visits of a host of four-legged trash collectors, most notably the giant hyenas). Instead, I want to tell you what I learned of the Minids while still trying to gain admittance to their clannish hearts.

  First, I found that between, say, ten in the morning and the hour before sunset, the males and the females often went their separate ways. Blessed or encumbered with children, the women—on days not expressly devoted to dawdling—occupied themselves accumulating berries, birds’ eggs, beetle larvae, scorpions, melons, and other easily portable foodstuffs, all of which they carried in crude bark trays or unsewn animal skins. One of the
older females had a vessel so expertly woven that I wondered if some unsung chrononaut had dropped back in time to give it to her, whereupon I realized that her “basket” was in fact a weaverbird nest that she or her husband had stolen from an acacia tree. (Necessity is often the mother of light fingers instead of invention.) With their children in tow and an armed male nearby to harry the kids back into the woods if danger threatened, the women skirted the edges of the savannah. To benchmark their progress through the bush, and to maintain contact with one another, they babbled, cooed, and scatsang as they foraged. Usually they gave way in silence to a herd of elephants or a pride of lions or a pack of giant hyenas. If, however, the interlopers were lesser hyenas, baboons, wild dogs, or robust australopithecines, the women were as capable as their male counterparts of raising a diversionary ruckus or a spirited defense of their foraging domains.

  Three or four times I contrived to tail the womenfolk, but I was no more welcome a tagalong than a flasher on an outing of Camp Fire Girls. Once aware of my presence, they invariably shrieked and hurled things at me. The stain imparted to my bush shorts by the albumin of a well-thrown guinea fowl’s egg remained set in the fabric to the day I gave them up for lost.

  Helen never went on these excursions. She had no child, and the womenfolk, though generally tolerant of her, were uneasy when she was about. Instead, Helen went hunting with the males.

  These hunts took place on the savannah, where, if ever I climbed off my belly, I was unable to disguise myself effectively. I saw either a great deal or almost nothing. It did become clear to me, though, that the Minids not only tolerated Helen among them but frequently put her in a position to deliver the coup de grâce after a well-coordinated stalk. Under my astonished gaze she batted down a warthog and a duiker. Often good for two or three days’ eating, these kills released the Minids from the burdensome need, if not the nagging desire, to hunt—so that I sometimes had nothing to do but sit in my tree and reread Genesis. The Minids, meanwhile, stayed in New Helensburgh and feasted.