Adam & Eve (29 page)

Holding the light above my head, I saw in its glow a silhouette, a dark blob with three parts moving together and then away to become individuals. Riley rolled away, and Adam held a third something, person? He forced the animal or person—someone small—against the trunk of an apple tree. Reaching up, Adam jerked down one of the streamers from the tree above Riley’s bed. Quickly Riley secured whatever man or beast it was to the trunk. Still the person or baboon kicked his feet, but Adam stood out of reach of his thrashing, and Riley knelt at one side.

When I got closer, my taper illumined dark splotches on Riley’s shirt and dark smears around his mouth. His eyes were wide, terrified and outraged.

“He tried to make me eat something!” Riley exclaimed. “It’s still in his hand.”

Adam continued to kneel beside the boy—for the beast was a boy with a long and shaggy head of hair—who kicked to no avail all the harder. As I approached, and my firebrand brightened the scene, I could see color. Riley’s face was smeared with blood.

Quickly Adam took the light and held it close to the boy’s face. His bowed head was a shock of straight black hair that curtained his features.

“Sit on his legs, Riley,” Adam said, and Riley moved over—careful of his incompletely healed ankle, I noticed. His weight was enough to quiet the struggling legs of the boy, who was small. I thought him about twelve or thirteen. His chest was bare and hairless, but hair straggled from his armpits. Like Adam, he wore no clothing. The boy’s pubis was shockingly dark with hairy growth.

Holding the lighted stick well back, with his other hand, Adam gently gathered the hair from around the boy’s face. Suddenly Adam sprang back.

“I know him.”

I was stunned.

Adam handed the torch to me, and I moved closer as he knelt down beside the boy.

“Hello,” Adam said, carefully and quietly.

The boy glared at him.

“I remember you,” Adam said gently. “You took care of me. When they
threw me out of the truck, you fed me.” He stopped and touched Riley’s shoulder. “My friend was trying to take care of you. He was trying to feed you.”

“Not goddamn likely,” Riley said, as I stared at the blood smeared on his face.

“He doesn’t understand us, of course,” Adam said. He held out both his hands in front of the boy. Slowly he opened one of his hands and brought it to his own mouth to mimic eating, then pointed at the boy and then at himself. “You fed me,” he said, pointing again at the boy and then himself, and then making the gesture of eating. “You fed me,” he said again. “Thank you.”

Adam stood up. “Lucy, do we have anything left we could offer him to eat?”

“No,” I answered.

“We have to untie him,” Adam said, “and let him go.”

“What in God’s name was he trying to stuff down my gullet?” Riley asked. He rolled off the boy’s legs.

Slowly the boy flexed his knobby knees. Like a frightened animal, he began to pant. Adam went behind him and untied his hands. The boy jumped up, his chest heaving. With his fists still clenched, he parted his own unruly hair with a finger from each hand and looked first at Riley, defiantly, and then at Adam, sullenly. He only stood as high as their shoulders, about my height. To him, the two men must have looked like giants. One of the boy’s clenched fists was oozing blood.

Adam opened his own hand and pointed to the boy’s hand.

Slowly the boy opened his hand.

“What the devil is that?” Riley said.

At first, I thought the boy held a mouse, skinned, bloody, and raw. When I looked at Adam, I thought he might be about to vomit. He averted his eyes, gagged, then made himself look again.

“It’s the heart of a lamb,” Adam said softly.

The boy started to move away, but he looked back at Adam and moved his head in a gesture that surely meant we, at least Adam, were to follow him. The boy was slight, but his body looked wiry and agile. Though he moved quickly, like a purposeful animal, the boy was not running away. Adam followed
closely behind him. I followed slowly, realizing Riley had picked up his crutch and was trying to join us.

The wild boy led us into the garden, past the vegetables and the iris, to the roses, the garden in the heart of the garden. On the ground, a woolly lamb lay on its back. The white woolly arms and legs were stretched out and pegged to the ground with sticks. Its bloody chest, slit open, was an empty cavity.

Adam sank down before the lamb, covered his face with his large hand, and wept.

The boy slid back into the darkness, as though it had been opened for him, and disappeared into its black pocket.

I knelt beside Adam and put my arm across his broad shoulders. He seemed felled by grief.

“It’s all right, Adam,” I said. “We’re all right.”

On the other side, Riley knocked against Adam’s arm with the side of his crutch. “Hey, man,” Riley said, “what kind of damn craziness is this, huh?”

I could feel Adam gathering himself together. Still kneeling, he reached over for a moment and rested his hand on my thigh. I placed my hand on top of his and pressed his hand firmly against my leg.

“How’d you know that—that damn heart come from a lamb?” Riley asked.

“I recognized it.” Adam rose from his knees. “We raised sheep in Idaho.” He put his hand on my shoulder to steady himself. All the way back, he kept his hand on my shoulder, as though I were a trusted crutch, though the weight on me was only that of his hand.

When we returned to the orchard, Adam said that he and Riley would move their mats to sleep next to me.

“You don’t think he’s dangerous, do you?” Riley asked.

“I don’t know,” Adam said. “He saved my life.”

“I guess he was trying to help me, too? Like a bat out of hell, he just swoops down on me trying to stuff a goddamn heart in my mouth.” Riley clutched his throat and spat. “Makes me want to puke.”

Adam said nothing.

In the morning, I heard Riley asking Adam if he thought the boy had any kind of weapon.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Adam answered.

“Then how’d he get the heart out of the lamb?”

“He crushed the breastbone with a large rock. Then he used another rock to drive a broken stick into the chest. Then he pulled the heart out with his fingers.” Adam shifted his gaze from Riley to me. “It was a little lamb. Not even half grown.”

Adam took a strip of orange fabric nearly two feet wide and wrapped it around his waist and hips to make a short sarong. With another strip, he made a belt for himself and tied the handle of Riley’s military knife in a knot of the belt.

We buried the lamb among the yellow rosebushes. Lacking a shovel, we found digging hard work, a matter of finding flat stones to scrape aside the soil.

Because of that grotesque night, we stood within sight of one another on the banks of the river while we fished, and we moved together as a group to gather wood to replenish the fire. “I want a lot of wood,” Adam said. “Enough for a bonfire.”

All the following day we stayed close together and kept an eye out for what I thought of as the feral boy, but no one saw anything of him. It was a sad day, though the powerful sun brightened every gesture and move we made. With not a single cloud to shield us, the unremitting sun almost made me nauseous. All day I hoped to see the French horn case. Yet when I mistook a black, humped rock beside the river for the bell curve of the case, it seemed a malignant thing. I wondered where the boy had taken shelter during the torrential rains. Had he found a cave? Or visited ours? I remembered my dream of someone like him hovering over me.

That night, after we lay down under the still-full moon, a sound came from the distance that made the air shake and creak. The return of thunder, I surmised, or the shudder of a volcano, but soon I realized it was only lions roaring from the grassland. Because the moon was so bright, perhaps the male
lions were urging the females to hunt by its light. I had never seen them hunt by any light, or even found a carcass from a kill. Then I heard a new sound from the plain, a persistent, drumming thunder.

“The zebras are running,” Adam said, “hunted by the lions.” As the frenzied drumming grew nearer, he rose and built up the fire, till the flames were almost as tall as he. “Come stand behind the fire,” Adam told us.

“Did you know they would panic?” I asked. “Is that why you wanted lots of firewood?”

“I didn’t know. Something just told me to stock up. To provide.”

“Like your rock pile, huh?” Riley commented.

Before Riley came, Adam would have said God had told him what to do. Now he was less extravagant. There is a grammar of vividness, I thought, a persuasive rhetoric. What we can see or imagine, we can convince ourselves to believe.

With increasing volume, the running of the hooves came closer. The herd was veering toward us. The zebras were crossing the grassland, now through the garden, and now toward the apple orchard. Our wall of darkness was shattered by white stripes on their emerging faces, then the black-and-white necks and running shoulders of the zebras. They wouldn’t plunge through the bonfire, I felt sure, but Adam reached out both arms and drew Riley and me close against him so that we were all squarely behind the protective flames.

The striped flanks of zebras rushed past us on both sides. In their springing and leaping, the black and white moved in a zigzagging design, disorienting and frightening. The undulating pattern confused our eyes, while the thunder of their running baffled our ears. I wondered if the lions, too, would run past. I thought I saw tawny sides of lionesses streaking fast and low past the straight rows of palm trees. Finally only the stragglers of the zebra herd, their sides heaving, were passing the bonfire. I turned around to watch their striped hindquarters disappearing into the darkness, and finally the tassels on the ends of their ropy tails.

“Before tomorrow night we’ll move back to the cave,” Adam said.

Gradually the din of hoofbeats diminished, and Adam laid no more wood on the flames. Gradually, I let go of the tension in my body. When any of the
three of us glanced at another, there was a faint smiling in the fire glow. We were survivors. Then, from far away, there was a sound like growling, a faint recapitulation, and I thought of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6, how after the intensity of the storm has passed, the composer lets a few diminuendo growls from the kettledrums precede the return of harmony. When I sat beside Thom in the concert hall, I had imaged a gathering of villagers coming out to make merry when safety replaced the receding storm. Maybe we would hear the sound of piping, even in Mesopotamia, with a village congregating for a country dance. Had Adam said he would fashion a flute? Such a small village were we—only three. Four if I counted the feral boy.

As soon as dawn came, the air filled with birds and insects on the move. First the green parrots burst out of the tops of the palm trees as though the leaves themselves had taken sudden flight. Clusters of monarch butterflies and then their imitators, the viceroys, rose up out of milkweed and joe-pye weed at the edge of the garden, and then the majestic tiger swallowtails lifted themselves from the garden phlox and the modest little gray hairstreaks from the low red clover. Locusts began to whir around, and a flock of crows swooped down to feed on them.

When the three of us visited the garden, we saw that the beds were pockmarked by the curved hooves of the zebras and the cloven hooves of ungulates. The rosebushes were battered to the ground. The flower garden was devastated, and the stems of the tomato and squash plants were also broken and mangled. Occasionally a pomegranate, like a broken jewel box, had been smashed and lay on the ground with its glistening seeds exposed. Cardinals came to peck at them.

I thought of how medieval gardens were often enclosed by wooden fences to protect them from the surrounding animals. Now, since the zebra stampede, I saw the necessity of dividing garden from wilderness, something that previously had seemed unnecessarily exclusive to me. I thought that someday I would like to make a medieval garden, if I moved from New York to some more peaceful place, the South perhaps, or back to Iowa and the Midwest.

The men regarded the ruined garden with less distress than I. There was Adam, newly clothed for the new day, with his short sarong around his waist and thighs, but I knew his body so well, it was as though he still stood open and nude before me. I noted his knife belt and his headband. The orange referenced by way of contrast his black wavy hair. There was Riley, with his lengthening red hair, who had never taken off his camouflage uniform of sage and sand, already moving with his crutch toward the rock shelter.

Would the garden recover? Not during our tenure, I thought.

When we were resettled at the shelter in the cliff, I felt disinclined to go down at all. I left it to Adam and Riley to fish and to gather fallen vegetables, fruit, and nuts, firewood and ferns for our beds. They used squares of parachute fabric to carry home the harvest, like sheets tied for bundling laundry.

After a few days in the cave, still not wanting to go down, I decided to entertain myself by sewing. Because Riley’s foot gave him some trouble, even walking with the crutch, I asked Adam to visit the beach and to bring back the yarn and needles Riley had found in the dash compartment of the Cub.