Ancient of Days (19 page)

Indeed, although Adam had accepted baptism in Christ Jesus’s name, the prayer ritual in his hospital room had an ecumenical cast. Here is one of his prayers, typed out on the little machine he used to engage in animated dialogues with us:

Creator, awake or asleep, watchful or drowsing,

Timeless or time-bound,

Awake fully to my oh-so-silent cry.

Remember the long-ago dead who loved animals and clouds,

Redeem them in your pity-taking Thought.

And those who stumbled on the edge of Spirit,

Who prowled, as do hyenas, just beyond the Light,

Think them, too, into the center of the Fire,

Consume them like sweet carrion in the loving warmth

Of your Gut and Mind.

If I am all Animal, Creator,

Give my growls, my whimpers, and my barks

The sound of angels hymning praise.

Let me not sing only for Myself

But also for the billion billion unbaptized Dead

With talons, teeth, and tails to herd them

Into unmarked graves of no importance.

O Gut and Mind above and all about,

Hear my oh-so-silent plea on their behalf

And lift them as you have lifted Men. Amen.

After the baptism, every visit to Adam’s room concluded with a prayer. Once, I asked him what he believed he was accomplishing with such ritual.

On his lap machine, he typed:
THERE IS NO TRUE RELIGION WITHOUT PRAYER.

That led me to question the value of religion, true or not, and Adam struggled to answer that one, too. Finally, he typed this compound word:
SELF-DEFINITION.

He found it amusing that the value of a belief in a Higher Power had its ultimate ground in one’s own ego. Was that a contradiction? No, not really. A paradox? Probably. But if Adam felt a greater sense of urgency about his relationship with God than did most twentieth-century human beings, the ambiguity of his status vis-à-vis both God and his two-legged fellows fueled that feeling.

“You know,” I told him after reading his “Gut and Mind” prayer, “you’re assuming a rigid line between the ensouled and the soulless, human beings and humanoid animals.”

Go on, he signaled.

“You’ve made it an either/or proposition. But what if there’s a gray area where the transition takes place?”

LIKE THE DUSK SEPARATING DAY FROM NIGHT?

“Exactly.”

I read his next haltingly written response over his shoulder:
I UNDERSTAND, MISTER PAUL, THE BASIS OF HOW YOU ARGUE HERE. THE WORRY ABOUT WHAT AN EARLY HOMINID IS, BEAST OR PERSON. BUT MANY THINGS, I THINK, IT TAKES TO MAKE A CREATURE
HUMAN
, AND IF A CREATURE IS MISSING ONLY ONE OR TWO, I DO NOT BELIEVE IT IS RIGHT TO SAY, AH HA, YOU DO NOT BELONG TO HUMAN SPECIES.

“Okay, Adam, if you believe that human beings have souls, then anyone on this side—
our
side—of the transitional area has one. You’re safe because . . . well, because you’ve successfully interbred with a human woman.”

IT IS NOT SO EASY

“Why not?”

BECAUSE A CREATURE GOING THROUGH ANIMALNESS TO HUMANITY—IN THEORY, I TELL YOU—GOES THROUGH A MAPPABLE SORT OF EVOLUTIONARY JOURNEY. BUT A SOUL DOES NOT DIVIDE OR BREAK. YOU CANNOT GET CHANGE FOR IT. YOU HAVE ONE IN YOUR POCKET OR YOU DO NOT. WHERE DOES GOD REACH INTO THE DUSK TO GIVE A SOUL TO ANY CREATURE ON THIS JOURNEY? WHAT REASONS DOES HE HAVE TO MAKE THIS MYSTERIOUS GIFT?

“If God’s gift is mysterious, Adam, maybe it’s impossible to know and futile to fret. Maybe we should forget the whole stupid notion of souls, immortal or otherwise.”

DOES IGNORING SUCH HARD QUESTIONS SEEM TO YOU, MISTER PAUL, AN ADMIRABLE WAY TO LIVE?

“If they’re nonquestions. If they don’t have any answers.”

Adam considered my reply.
FOR ME, THEY ARE REAL QUESTIONS
. He advanced the sheet of paper and added at the bottom of the page:
LET US PRAY.

RuthClaire, present throughout this verbal and typed exchange, took from her handbag a slick little paperback,
The Way of a Pilgrim
, reputedly by an anonymous nineteenth-century Russian peasant, and read aloud from its opening page:

“
‘On the twenty-fourth Sunday after Pentecost I went to church to say my prayers there during the Liturgy. The first Epistle of St. Paul to the Thessalonians was being read, and among other words I heard these—“Pray without ceasing.” It was this text more than any other, which forced itself upon my mind, and I began to think how it was possible to pray without ceasing, since a man has to concern himself with other things also in order to make a living.’
”

Soon RuthClaire was leading us in chanting the pilgrim’s habitual prayer, the Prayer of Jesus, which goes, “
Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me
.” Throughout this chanting, though, I could think of nothing but how well Livia George was getting along at the West Bank without me.

Damn her, anyway.

*

At the Montaraz house, I earned my keep preparing all the meals that we did not take at the hospital or at off-campus eateries. Keeping my hand in, I called this culinary activity. T. P. ate with us on most of these cozy occasions, growing fonder of me with each bite. He no longer
smarled
at me, he unequivocally smiled. He especially liked a cheese-and-baby-shrimp omelet that I served up one morning for breakfast.

RuthClaire and I got along like brother and sister. Nights, I kept to the upstairs guest room with its bamboo-shoot wallpaper while she kept to the master bedroom just down the hall. T. P. awoke me in the morning by filching the bedcovers with a clever hand-over-hand motion that left the sheet and spread piled up on the floor like a drift of Dairy Queen ice cream. He wanted that gourmet omelet, and I was just the man to rustle it up. Less a godfather than an indulgent uncle, I happily obliged him.

Sister and brother, RuthClaire and I. My stay in the Montaraz house finally reconciled me to our divorce. In the bathroom, too many conjugal clues to overlook: a common toothpaste tube (neatly rolled up from the bottom), His & Her electric razors, a jar of antiperspirant that they no doubt shared. We did not sleep together during my stay, RuthClaire and I, and the tension between us drained away. I was at ease in the Montaraz house, in total harmony with all its occupants. Or almost total harmony.

How do you develop a cordial relationship with a hefty bearded young man who wears a .38 pistol strapped to his right ankle and a Ruger .357 half hidden under a fold of his Chattanooga Choo Choo T-shirt? This was Bilker Moody, the laconic Vietnam vet and erstwhile automobile repossessor who served as the Montaraz family’s chief security guard. Unmarried and virtually relative-less, he had adopted RuthClaire, Adam, and T. P. as surely as they had adopted him. I had met Bilker back in February, but he had stayed obsessively out of sight during those three days, as if the announced brevity of my visit required from him this considerate disappearing act.

Now, I saw Bilker Moody every day. Although he reputedly had an apartment of his own somewhere, during the week he slept in a small bare room—at one time a walk-in pantry—between the kitchen and the garage. The Montarazes had agreed to this live-in arrangement because it obviated the need to hire guards in shifts, as I had done at Paradise Farm. Also, Bilker had insisted that his vested interest in his own quarters would make him more vigilant than a guard from off the premises.

True, he sometimes took catnaps, but his experience in Southeast Asia had taught him to leap up at the tread of a cockroach. Besides, his peculiar circadian rhythms made him keenest at night, when the threat of intrusion was greatest. He was no slouch during the day, either. He had the reflexes, instincts, and nerves of a champion
jai-alai
player, despite his formidable bulk. He had honed his skills not only in the jungles of Vietnam but also during daring daylight recoveries of automobiles whose buyers had failed to keep up their payments. The Montarazes could scarcely go wrong engaging a willing man of his size, character, and fearlessness.

Bilker Moody genuinely esteemed the folks under his care. T. P. was fond of him, too, and had a remorseless fascination for the big man’s full-face beard. Around the child, Bilker displayed the retiring gentleness of a silverback gorilla. Usually, though, he avoided any play activity for fear of letting his guard slip. Enemies of the Montarazes’ privacy were everywhere. During my stay in July, he intercepted and politely ran off any number of curiosity-seekers. That was his job, not babysitting.

Bilker had as little to do with me as possible. He refused to eat the meals I fixed for RuthClaire and T. P., but clearly did not believe I was trying to poison anyone. If he and I chanced to approach each other, he showily gave me room to get by, sometimes mumbling “Hey” and sometimes not. RuthClaire said this was a respectful posture that, as an enlisted man, Bilker had automatically assumed for officers—but all I could think as I eased past was that he was pulling the pin on, and preparing to toss, a fragmentation grenade. Didn’t he know that in the late 1950s (ca. Elvis Presley’s induction), I had spent two years of obligatory military service as an enlisted man?

“Is it my breath?” I asked RuthClaire. “Too much garlic in the blintzes?”

“He’s shy, that’s all. His duty here is his life.”

“Shy, huh? How long had you and Adam known him before he began spilling his war and repo-man stories?”

“He wanted a job, Paul. He had to talk to get it. He doesn’t dislike you. He just feels uneasy about you, knowing you came to bolster the guard.”

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.