Ancient of Days Page 4

  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.

  “What do you think?” I asked him.

  “I might do better to go out there as an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service,” he said, somewhat high-handedly. “I think a strong case could be made for regarding Adam as an illegal alien.”

  “How so, Herr Professor?”

  Nollinger embarked on a lengthy explanation. Purely on impulse he had shown one of his closest friends at Emory, Caroline Hanna, a young woman with a doctorate in sociology, three or four of my photographs of Adam. Nollinger was seriously involved with Caroline, and he knew that she would not betray his confidence. The photographs had had a strange effect on her, though. They had prompted her to reveal that in her after-hours work with Cuban detainees in the Atlanta Penitentiary she had met one hardened Havana street criminal from the 1980 Freedom Flotilla who confessed that he belonged in prison, either in Cuba or in los Estados Unidos. Indeed, Uncle Fidel had released this cutthroat from a Havana lockup on the express condition that he emigrate and commit fifty-seven different varieties of mayhem on every American capitalist who ran afoul of him. Instead, he fled down the northern coast of Cuba in a stolen army Jeep and later on foot to Punta Gorda, where, after hiding out for two weeks, he commandeered a fishing vessel piloted by a wealthy Haitian with strong anti-Duvalier sympathies and the strangest three-man crew that the cutthroat had ever seen.

  “What was a Haitian doing in Cuban waters?” I asked Nollinger.

  “Probably running communist guns back to the ill-organized guerrilla opposition to Duvalier in the wilderness areas around Port-de-Prix. Caroline says the Cuban told her the vessel hadn’t yet taken on any cargo when he surprised the gunrunner near Punta Gorda. He knifed the Haitian and threw him overboard. In the process, he became aware of three half-naked enanos—dwarfs, I guess you’d say—watching him from behind the fishing tackle and cargo boxes in the vessel’s stern. They reminded him of intelligent monkeys, not just animalistic dwarves, and they made him intensely uncomfortable. With a pistol he found concealed in the pilothouse, he stalked and mortally wounded two of these three mute witnesses to his crime. Their small gnarly corpses went overboard after their captain’s fleshy mulatto body, and the cutthroat set his sights on the last of the funny little men scurrying about the boat to escape his wrath.”

  “The gunrunner’s crew consisted of habilines?” For the first time that afternoon, Nollinger had piqued my curiosity.

  “I think it did, Mr. Loyd, but all I’m doing now is telling Caroline’s version of the Cuban thug’s account of his round-about trip to Key West. Draw your own inferences.”

  “What happened to the last crew member?”

  “The Cubans the Haitian gunrunner had planned to rendezvous with to make the weapons transfer pulled abreast of the vessel and took the killer into custody. They also captured the terrified hominid. They confiscated the Haitian’s boat. Our detainee in the Atlanta pen says these mysterious Cuban go-betweens—they were all wearing lampblack on their faces—separated him and the surviving crew member and shipped them both to Mariel Bay for the crossing to the States. Caroline’s informant never saw the funny little man again. Nevertheless, he’s absolutamente cierto this creature reached Florida in one of the jam-packed charter boats making up the Freedom Flotilla. You see, there abounded among some of the refugees rumors of a small hairy mute in sailcloth trousers who kept up their spirits with his odd mimes and japery. As soon as the crossing was made, though, he disappeared into the dunes before the INS authorities could screen him as they finally did those who wound up in stateside camps or prisons.”

  “Adam?” I asked.

  “It seems likely, Mr. Loyd. Besides, this story dovetails nicely with the fact that your ex-wife hasn’t had as much trouble as might be expected domesticating—taming—her habiline. Although he seems to have returned to feral habits while scrounging his way up through Florida while avoiding large population centers, his early days on a tiny island off the coast of Haiti made him familiar with a few of the trappings of civilization. Your wife, although she doesn’t know it, has been reminding Adam of these things rather than painstakingly writing them down on a blank slate.”

  For a time, we sipped our beers in silence. I pondered everything Nollinger had told me. Maybe it explained how Adam had come from Haiti (of all places) to western Georgia, but it did not explain how several representatives of Homo habilis, more than 1.5 million years after their disappearance from East Africa, h
ad ended up inhabiting a minuscule island off the larger island of Hispaniola. Did Herr Professor Nollinger have an answer for that objection, too?

  “Working from Caroline’s informant’s story,” he replied, “I did some discreet research in the anthropological and historical holdings of the Emory library. First, I found out all I could about the island off Hispaniola from which the wealthy Haitian had conscripted his crew. It’s called Montaraz, Mr. Loyd—originally a Spanish rather than a French possession. But in the mid-1820s, an American named Louis Rutherford, a New England aristocrat in our diplomatic service, bought Montaraz from a military adviser to Haitian president Jean Pierre Boyer. This was during the Haitian occupation of the Dominican Republic, which had declared its independence from Spain in 1821. The Dominicans regard their twenty-two-year subjugation to Haitian authority as a period of barbarous tyranny; still, one of Boyer’s real accomplishments was the emancipation of Dominican slaves. But on Montaraz, in Manzanillo Bay, Louis Rutherford reigned supreme, and his liberal sentiments did not extend to releasing his black, mulatto, and Spanish-Arawak laborers or to paying them for their contributions to the success of his cacao and coffee plantations. He appointed a proxy to keep these enterprises going and divided his time between Port-au-Prince and the Vermont family estate.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with Adam, RuthClaire, or me.” In another hour, my first customers for dinner would be coming through the door. Further, at any moment I expected Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and Molly Kingsbury to report, with my two evening-shift waitresses close behind. Nollinger was ignorant of, or indifferent to, my business concerns; he wandered into the kitchen to help himself to another beer and came back to our table swigging from its can like a skinny athlete chug-a-lugging Gatorade. He had his wits about him, though. He tilted the top of the can toward me and soberly resumed his story:

  “In 1836, Mr. Loyd, Rutherford was sent to the court of Sa’īd ibn Sultan, Al Bū Sa’īd, on the island of Zanzibar off the East African coast. We Americans were the first westerners to make trade agreements with Sa’īd and the first to establish a consulate at his commercial capital in the western Indian Ocean. Rutherford went along because of his ‘invaluable experience’ on Hispaniola, where he had had to deal with both conquering Haitians and defiant Dominicans, a situation that some U.S. officials felt had parallels on the East African coast, where Sayyid Sa’īd was attempting to impose his authority on the continental port cities of Mombasa, Kilwa, and Bravanumbi. Moreover, British moral objections notwithstanding, Zanzibar had a flourishing slave market; and Rutherford, as his American colleagues knew, recognized the commercial imperatives that drove even kindly persons like Sayyid Sa’īd and himself to tolerate the more sordid aspects of the institution . . . to turn a profit. It was the perfect assignment for Rutherford.

  “Two years after his arrival on Zanzibar, about the time he was scheduled to return to this country, Rutherford caught wind of an extraordinary group of blacks—pygmies, it was rumored, or hairy Bushmen—who had been taken to the Sultan’s representatives in the continental port city of Bravanumbi by several Kikembu warriors and sold for immediate shipment to either Zanzibar or Pemba to work on Sayyid Sa’īd’s clove plantations. The Kikembu warriors called their captives ‘little ones who do not speak’ and claimed they’d found all nineteen of these uncanny quasi-human specimens in a system of caves and burrows in the remote Lolitabu Hills of Zarakal. The warriors had stumbled upon the system by accident, after watching one of these funny little people, a male, sneaking through a gulley with two dead hares and a kaross of nuts and tubers. The hunters then proceeded to smoke the manikins out. Four or five of the little ones preferred to die in their arid labyrinth rather than to emerge to face the laughing Kikembu, but the remainder were captured and bound.

  “An Omani retainer in Sa’īd’s court told Rutherford to go to the slave market there on Zanzibar to see these wonderful ‘monkeymen.’ At present, they were being kept apart from the other slaves to spare them injury at the hands of the larger blacks with whom they would compete for masters. It was also likely that outraged potential buyers might harm them. After all, said the retainer, you looked for strength in a slave, not delicacy or sinewy compactness. Rutherford went to the market and arranged to see the Zarakali imports in private. Apparently, the sight of these creatures entranced him. He wanted the entire lot. He bought them from Sayyid Sa’īd’s representatives with cash and a promise to do his best to establish a cacao-for-cloves trade between Montaraz and Zanzibar. When he left the Sultan’s court, he sailed around the Cape of Good Hope in a vessel laden with silks, spices, and a small cargo of habilines—although, of course, nobody called them habilines then. They were manikins, or monkey-folk, curiosities. Rutherford hoped not only to put them to work on Montaraz but also to breed them into a self-perpetuating population. Later, in the States, he would exploit them—some of them, anyway—for their novelty value.”

  “He never did that, I take it.”

  “Rutherford died on Montaraz in 1844, the same year Santo Domingo regained its independence from the Haitian interlopers. His holdings on the island were seized by followers of Pedro Santana. What happened to the fourteen diminutive blacks who survived the journey from East Africa—Rutherford’s wife once referred to them in a letter to the wife of another diplomat as ‘endearing little elves, albeit, most likely, the offspring of chimpanzees and debauched Zarakali niggers’—well, at this point, their fate is unclear. We have knowledge of them at all only because Mrs. Rutherford acted as her husband’s secretary and carried on voluminous correspondences with her relatives in Boston and Montpelier. I obtained some of this information, Mr. Loyd, from interlibrary loans and photocopying services, and I’m virtually certain that no one else in the world has an inkling of the importance—the staggering importance—of the material I’ve assembled and synthesized in only two and a half weeks. It’s the major scientific accomplishment of my life.”

  “Beats injecting macaques with No-Dōz, huh?” I had begun setting my tables, single-handedly flapping open parachutes of linen and laying out silverware. Just as Nollinger was about to parry my sarcasm, Livia George appeared. As the anthropologist shuffled the photographs of Adam out of her line of sight, I told her, “This is my cousin from Atlanta. He’ll be staying with us a few days.”

  “Nephew,” Nollinger corrected me, standing for the introduction.

  “Right,” I acknowledged. “Nephew.”

  Livia George came over and shook Nollinger’s hand. “Pleased to meecha. You’re too skinny, thoah—all shanks and shoulder blades. Stay aroun’ here a few days and I’ll get you fatted up fine as any stockyard steer.”

  “That’s a promise,” I informed Nollinger, “not a threat.”

  “Thank you,” he said uncertainly. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  RuthClaire did not come to town either of the next two days, and Nollinger stayed after me to drive him out to see her. He was missing his morning classes at Emory, he said, and a colleague at the field station had to oversee the daily amphetamine injections of his drug-addled macaques. He could not stay in Beulah Fork much longer. Did I want him to get Adam out of RuthClaire’s life or not? If I did, I had to cooperate. Had I summoned him all the way from Atlanta only to confine him to my grungy attic-cum-dormitory? Was I that desperate for a roommate?

  I was ready to cooperate. Entirely at my expense, my counterfeit nephew ate nothing but medium-rare steaks and extravagant tossed salads with Roquefort dressing. Moreover, to amuse himself between his final meal of the day and his own owlish turn-in time, he had brought with him a homemade syrinx, or panpipe, that he played with a certain melancholy skill but an intemperance that sabotaged, early on, my regard. Sometimes (he told me as we lay on our cots in the dark) he played the panpipe for his experimental subjects at the field station, and the strains of this music soothed even the most agitated and bellicose of the males. It was an unscientific thing to do (he conceded) because it introduced a
n extraneous element into his observations of their behavior, but he found it hard to deny them—completely, anyway—the small pleasure afforded by his playing.

  “I’m not a macaque,” I replied. Both the hint and the implied criticism were lost on Nollinger. Anyway, I was not that desperate for a roommate. So, the next day, I swallowed hard and telephoned RuthClaire, explaining that a young man who greatly admired her work had stopped in at the West Bank to request an introduction. Would it be all right if I brought him out? He did not seem to be (1) an art dealer, (2) a salesman, (3) a potential groupie, (4) a college kid with a term paper due, or (5) an out-and-out crazy. I liked both his looks and his attitude.

  “Is he your nephew, Paul?”

  “What?”

  “Edna Twiggs told me yesterday that your nephew was staying with you.”

  “That’s right, RuthClaire. He’s my nephew.”

  “You don’t have a nephew, Paul. Even Edna Twiggs knows that. That’s because you don’t have any brothers or sisters.”

  “I had to tell the home folks something, RuthClaire. They don’t rest easy till they’ve got every visiting stranger pigeonholed. You know how some of them can be. I didn’t want it going around that I’d set up house with another guy.”

  “Not much chance of that,” RuthClaire said. “But why such petty intrigue and deception, hon? What’s the real story?”

  I improvised. “I’m thinking of selling out,” I said hurriedly. “His name’s Brian Nollinger and he’s a potential buyer. Neither of us wants to publicize the fact—to keep from confusing everyone if the deal falls through. We’re trying to prevent disillusionment or maybe even gloating. You understand?”

  “Selling out? But, Paul, you love that place.”

  “Once I did. I’ve only kept it these past fifteen months because I thought we might get back together. But that seems less and less likely, doesn’t it?”