Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  Late one evening, then, after cleaning up after another midnight supper, I went to Bilker’s pantry to air the question man-to-man. The door to the pantry was ajar, revealing one wall of naked studs and a section of ceiling composed entirely of ancient tongue-and-groove slats. Tentatively, I rapped.

  “What?” demanded Bilker Moody.

  Beyond the pantry’s raised threshold, he sat on his rollaway bed with his Ruger trained on my abdomen. Recognizing me, he laid the pistol down. Disdainfully.

  “Thought we could talk a minute,” I said.

  The pantry contained a plywood counter upon which sat a sophisticated array of surveillance equipment, a hotplate, a General Electric coffee maker, a computer, and a small wire rack of paperback computer manuals and soft-core pornographic novels. A huge commercial calendar hung over the bed. Its pinup photograph was not of a bare-breasted nymphet but of a customized car with mud flaps and Gatling-gun exhausts. The company responsible for the calendar made socket wrenches.

  Bilker Moody shook some cartridges into his palm from a box. He inspected each bullet tip in turn.

  “I’ve been impressed with your performance around here,” I told him, hoping to disarm him with praise. He looked me full in the face, his expression grim. “Do I rub you the wrong way, Mr. Moody?”

  “Ain’t no right way to rub me. Don’t like to be rubbed.”

  “I’m not here to put your job in jeopardy. I’m glad you’re here. I only came because Adam wanted me to.”

  “Why?”

  The question surprised me. “As a kindness to RuthClaire, I guess.”

  “If Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd.”

  That stopped me briefly. Then I said, “That’s what I tell myself when I’m feeling down: ‘Hey, Paul, if Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd.’ Cheers me right up.”

  “Stay out of my way.”

  “This time next week, I will have been gone three or four days.”

  “I tell you that,” Bilker Moody said, unblinking, “’cause wherever I am, that’s where the heat’s gonna be. You come in, I go out. It’s for your own good.”

  “That’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it?”

  “You’re the joker got took for that joyride down in the Fork? The one got a cross burned on his lawn?”

  “So you’re really expecting trouble?”

  “I’m paid to expect it.”

  “Then maybe I’d better leave you to your work.”

  “’Night,” he said. “And on your way out—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t let the doorknob ream you in the asshole.”

  “Mr. Moody—”

  “Call me Bilker.” His eyebrows lifted, maybe to suggest his vulgar parting shot had been intended companionably, maybe to stress the irony of inviting me to use his first name after firing that shot. He raised the Ruger and waved it at the door.

  “Good night, Bilker. Really enjoyed our chat.”

  The next morning, I told RuthClaire about this exchange, as nearly verbatim as I could make it. She said I’d made a skeptical convert of Bilker. The proof of his good opinion was that he never joked with incorrigible turds, only those who struck him as recyclable into relatively fragrant human beings. Thanks a lot, I said. But I settled for it. It was better than getting fragged in my sleep. . . .

  RuthClaire and Adam had a downstairs studio, once a living room and parlor. Previous occupants had knocked out the wall, though, and now you had elbow room galore down there. In this vast space were unused canvases, stretching frames, makeshift easels, and even a sheet of perforated beaverboard with pegs and braces for hanging art supplies and tools. Elsewhere, finished and half-finished paintings leaned against furniture, reposed in untidy stacks, or vied for attention on the only wall where the artists had thought enough of their work to display it as if in a gallery.

  “No more plate paintings,” RuthClaire told me the night after my visit to Bilker. “I’m off in a new direction. Wanna see?”

  Of course I did. RuthClaire led me to a stack of canvases near a table consisting of three sawhorses capped by a sheet of plywood. All the paintings were small, no larger than three feet by four, most only a foot or two on their longest sides. RuthClaire had painted them in drab washed-out acrylics. They weren’t quite abstract, but neither were they representational—an ambiguity they shared with Adam’s bigger, bolder canvases.

  To me, in fact, RuthClaire’s new paintings looked like preliminaries for paintings she had not yet essayed in final form. That she considered them finished, and regarded them with undiluted enthusiasm, astonished me. I wondered what to say. M.-K. Kander’s photographs had at least given me the verbal ammunition of my outrage. Here, though, was little to comment on: murky beige or green backgrounds in which many anonymous shapes swam.

  “Well?” Then, noting my hesitation, she said, “Come on. Your honest reaction, Paul—the only kind that’s worth a flip.”

  “The honest reaction of a chef probably isn’t worth even that, Ruthie Cee.”

  “Oh, come on. You’ve got good art sense.”

  “Let me off the hook.”

  “You don’t like them?”

  “If I’d crayoned stuff like this in Mrs. Stanley’s fourth-grade class in Tocqueville, she’d have said I was wasting paper. That honest enough for you?”

  As if I’d yanked an invisible bridle, my ex’s nostrils flared. But she recovered and asked me why Mrs. Stanley would have made such a harsh judgment.

  “For muddying the colors.”

  “The muddiness is deliberate, Paul.”

  I said that, as a consequence, these paintings looked anemic, downright blah.

  “That’s an unconsidered first impression.”

  “I’ve been staring at them a good five minutes.”

  “A gnat’s eyeblink. Maybe you should live with one a while. Pick out the one you hate the least—or hate the most, for that matter—and take it home with you.”

  I sighed. RuthClaire’s pitiful acrylics belonged on a bonfire. Even Paleolithic cave art—the least rather than the most polished examples—outshone these hazy windows on my ex’s soul. In the nearly ten years I’d known her, I’d never seen her do less challenging or attractive work. It was hard to believe that living with one of these paintings would heighten my appreciation of it or any of the others.

  She began to explain what she was up to: freeing the work of pretense. Bright colors had a primitive appeal that rarely engaged the intellect. She was after a subtler means of capturing her audience. Artists had to risk alienating their audience—not with violence, sacrilege, or pornography, but with the unfamiliar, the understated, and the ambiguous—in order to make their art new. Viewers with the patience and the openness to outwait their first negative reactions would see what she was trying to do.

  “But what if the paintings are bad, kiddo—banal, lackluster, and ugly?”

  “Then they’ll never enlighten you, no matter how long you hang around them. Eventually, your negative reactions will be vindicated.” Quickly, though, she hedged this point: “Or maybe you’re just color-blind or tone-deaf to the work’s real merit.”

  “I know spoiled pork when I smell it. I don’t have to eat it to know it’s bad.”

  “A gourmet chef is a gourmet chef is a glorified short-order cook. An artist is an artist is an artist.”

  “That’s smug, RuthClaire, disgustingly smug.”

  She kissed my cheek. “You’ve noticed how small they are?”

  “A point in their favor.”

  “Another way to free them from pretense,” she said. “Rothko liked big paintings because the viewer has to climb into them and participate physically in their energy and movement. Well, I want the viewer to climb into these canvases intellectually—not in the clinical way a Mondrian demands, but in the spiritual way a decision for faith requires.”

  “You want the viewer to take the merit of these paintings on faith?”

  “I call
the series Souls, Paul.”

  “And that, of course, explains everything.”

  At this juncture, RuthClaire good-humoredly decided to end the argument. Never had we been so badly at odds on the subject of her art, and never had our disagreement on the subject had less effect on our good opinion of the other: weird.

  “Let’s go see Adam,” she said.

  That afternoon I left the hospital with T. P.—to give Adam and RuthClaire time together alone. Our destination was a recently remodeled restaurant called Everybody’s. It served beer, sandwiches, pizza, salads, and pasta in an airy, relaxed atmosphere perfectly suited to its mostly college-connected clientele.

  I ordered beer and a bacon-cheeseburger, but a Coke and a cheeseburger for my temporary ward. T. P. sat in a kiddie chair with a booster seat, and we whiled away forty-five minutes eating and watching people. Traffic plied the hill on North Decatur Road, squirrels scampered across the dappled campus, and emerald-necked pigeons strutted the sidewalks. I felt loose and at ease, almost ready to drowse. Staring into my beer, I may have actually done so.

  And then someone stood beside T. P. under Everybody’s angled skylights. I almost spilled my beer reacting to her presence.

  Before I could stand up, though, she sat down on the chair opposite mine. “Hello, Mr. Loyd. I recognized you from newspaper photos. The baby’s being here didn’t hurt, though. That made me look twice. Otherwise, I’d have walked on by.”

  “Another tribute to my personal magnetism.”

  The woman gave me a look of amiable amusement. I figured her to be in her early thirties—almost out of the range of my interest. Thin-boned and tall, she escaped looking angular. Springy amber ringlets framed her face. She wore a gold-plated necklace that seemed to be made up of dozens of minuscule glittering hinges. She folded her arms on the table, and the amber down prickling them caught the evanescent dazzle of the tiny hinges at her throat.

  “My name,” she said, “is Caroline Hanna.”

  I tried to get a grip on the familiarity of her name.

  “You’ve heard of me before. Once, at Brian Nollinger’s urging, you took some photographs of Adam. Brian showed these to me. And it was from me that he got the clue to research the island of Montaraz as Adam’s possible point of origin.”

  “Nollinger,” I said numbly.

  “You don’t like him, do you?”

  “In my book, he’s a world-class jerk.”

  “That’s not entirely fair,” Caroline Hanna said evenly.

  “I’m sure it isn’t. But his kindness to you, or to his aged mother, doesn’t absolve him of the dirt he kicked on my ex-wife. It doesn’t clear him of abusing my hospitality in Beulah Fork. To three quarters of his acquaintances, the man may be nobility incarnate—but if he shows me only his pimply backside, Miss Hanna, that’s what I’m going to judge him by.” She regarded me as if I were a sick bear in Atlanta’s zoo. “I called you Miss Hanna, didn’t I? You’re probably Doctor Hanna.”

  “Call me Caroline.”

  “Paul.” I tapped my thumb against my chest. “Anyway, I’m sorry to say your pal Nollinger, back in February, even had the brass to ask RuthClaire and Adam for money. He needed funds for field work he wanted to do somewhere.”

  “He’d come to apologize.”

  “Well, he blew that. He started talking about some painterly ape in England.”

  Caroline Hanna smiled wistfully. “That’s Brian, all right.”

  “What can I do for you? Would you like a beer?”

  She declined, saying she’d only wanted a closer look at T. P.—the sweetie—and to introduce herself to the man who’d tied Brian into the biggest event in evolutionary science since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species. She was glad to have contributed in a small way to the unraveling of the mystery of the origins of the Montaraz habilines. And she felt an odd kinship with me, each with our peripheral importance to the affair. Of course (she hastened to add), she was further on the periphery than I, but she sympathized with the muddle of feelings that a person in my position must sometimes experience. Wasn’t she running a gauntlet of small but painful changes herself?

  Ever the diplomat, I said, “Like what?”

  She said, “I wasn’t fishing for a chance to list them, honest.”

  “You don’t have to list anything. Just tell me the most painful of your changes. It might do you good.”

  Caroline considered this. Then she said, “Brian left Emory in June. He resigned his post in the anthropology department and left—without telling me anything. No foul play. He told the folks in his department. He just didn’t divulge his plans to me.”

  “Another teaching or research position somewhere?”

  “Not according to his department head. Brian said he was going to take off for a year and go overseas.”

  “Maybe to visit Alistair Patrick Blair in Zarakal.” Caroline smiled wanly. I added, “Self-possessed women frighten him. The lack of a goodbye is the damning proof. He’s what my mother would have called a cad.”

  “She would’ve had every right, but I’m not your mother.”

  I lifted my beer mug to Caroline. “Amen to that.” I set the mug down. “But what else? Surely, getting shut of the biggest No-Dōz pusher at that primate field station can’t top the list of your woes.”

  “You know you’re out of line, don’t you?”

  “Sorry. I can’t help my feelings about, uh, Brian. Tell me something that’ll stir my sympathy for him.”

  She started to rise. “Forgive me. I’ve got work to do.”

  I caught her wrist. “One more chance. One more item from your list of worries. And I won’t be such a sarcastic bastard again, believe me.”

  “No, you won’t,” Caroline said, subsiding. “How about this? The situation among the Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Penitentiary has me down. Some of those people belong in prison. Others deserve their freedom, and all my efforts to bring about releases have gone for naught. There. Do you like that one?”

  “I’m in sympathy with it.”

  “Stupid idealist.” She smiled gently. “I’m going.”

  “Don’t you want to know what I’m doing here . . . with T. P.?”

  “T. P.’s the baby? No. No, I don’t. It’s none of my business, and my business isn’t really any of yours, either.” Again she made as if to stand.

  “Give me your address so we can redefine the limits of each other’s business.”

  Hastily, she scribbled on the edge of a napkin. “Here’s a telephone number. Now I’ve got to go, really.”

  T. P. reacted to her move—throughout our talk, he’d stared at her with moony adoration—by reaching out and upsetting his drink. I gathered napkins with which to blot the mess. In order to get at it, I lifted T. P.’s chair out of the way.

  “Do you need some help?” Caroline asked.

  “No, I’ve got it. Look, though. The little bugger’s stuck on you, lady. So am I.”

  “Hush. That’s embarrassing.” She spoke in an undertone and looked around Everybody’s at everybody looking at us.

  “Knocking over his cup? Nah. Happens all the time with kids. Not embarrassing. People make allowances.”

  “I’m not talking about that, and you know it.” She retreated a step or two. “I won’t mind if you call, though—not at all.” Before I could reply, she’d gone.

  A young man with bushy hair and a long apron helped me finish cleaning up, and I sat back down. During her fifteen- or twenty-minute stint at our table, Caroline Hanna had affected me in the powerful, nonrational way teenagers sometimes collide with each other. A pulse in my throat was working, and a film of sweat on my palms endangered my grip on my beer mug. How ungrown-up. How immature. In a few years I would be fifty, and here I was actively encouraging the kind of hormonal rush that sends callow high-school aspirants to ecstasy screaming to the showers. Nobody since RuthClaire had made me feel that way, not even Molly Kingsbury.

  Later, our bill duly pai
d, T. P. and I returned to the hospital.

  Back in Adam’s recovery room, RuthClaire told me that David Blau had invited us to go with him and his wife Evelyn to a nightclub near the Georgia Tech campus. The club—Sinusoid Disturbances—was on a narrow alley perpendicular to Spring Street. Its main attraction was live music, but it also featured (although only on Fire Sine Fridays) the work of avant-garde “performance artists.” These artists used music, projected visual images, props, the spoken word, and a lot of strange choreographies to make statements about art and life. David ranked high among the performance artists who had given Sinusoid Disturbances its reputation as Atlanta’s leader on the New Wave nightclub scene. His group, consisting entirely of people from Abraxas, would headline at tonight’s Fire Sine Friday. And so Blau wanted RuthClaire and me to attend.

  “What about Adam?” I asked.

  The habiline typed: I BE FINE. TOMORROW, I AM UNWRAPPED. ME FOR REST AND READING.

  “May I bring a date?”

  This request startled RuthClaire. “A date?”

  “That’s right. A woman.”

  “I never assumed you meant a two-legged raisin. I just didn’t know you knew anybody up here to ask.”

  “I’ve been shinnying down a knotted sheet every night at your house, Ruthie Cee. Meet a lot of folks that way.”

  “It’s amazing Bilker hasn’t shot you. What’s her name?”

  “Caroline Hanna.”

  As I had done, RuthClaire struggled to locate this name in her mental ledger of friends and acquaintances. I let her struggle. In fact, I left Adam’s room in search of a telephone, found the number of the sociology department, dialed it, and asked to be put through to Dr. Hanna’s office. Although startled to hear from me so soon, she accepted my invitation, offering to meet me at the Montaraz house at seven-thirty, if that would simplify our rendezvous. Right now, though, no time for chitchat—she’d promised the students in her next class she’d have a test graded for them today.

  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.