in there. Reporters can climb trees, too, you know.”
“Adam and I installed some blinds. No worry there. The worry’s how long this stupid encirclement will last. I can’t work. Adam’s going to develop a nervous disorder.”
“Let the law run them off. That’s what the law’s for.”
“All right.”
“You could have figured that out for yourself. Why call me for advice?”
“To let you know how much trouble you’ve caused us, you dinkhead.” (But her tone was bantering rather than bitter.) “And another thing besides, Paul.”
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“Adam’s one failing as a companion is that he can’t talk. Maybe I wanted to hear the silver-throated con man of Beulah Fork do his stuff again.” She let me ruminate on this left-handed compliment for a second or two, then gave me her new telephone number and bade me a peremptory goodbye.
I sat awhile holding the receiver, but finally hung up before Edna Twiggs could break in to tell me I was on the verge of forfeiting continuous service.
International media attention converged on Paradise Farm. Neither the Beulah Fork police department nor the sheriff’s patrol from Tocqueville could handle the journalists, TV people, curiosity seekers, and scientists who descended on Hothlepoya County for a peek at RuthClaire’s habiline paramour. For a time, the Georgia Highway Patrol intervened, rerouting the gate-crashers back toward the interstate and issuing tickets to those who ignored the detour signs; but Ruben Decker and a few of the other residents along the road linking Paradise Farm with town protested that they’d been singled out for citations as often as had the journalists and pesky outsiders plaguing the area, many of whom, when stopped, gave false ID’s to prove their claims of being locals. At last, even the highway patrol threatened to retreat from the scene; this wasn’t their fight.
In desperation RuthClaire contracted with an Atlanta firm to erect a beige brick wall around the exposed sections of her property’s perimeter; and this barricade, upon its completion in May, proved an effective psychological as well as physical deterrent to most of those stopping by for a casual, rather than a mercenary or a malevolent, look-see. Pale arc lights on tall poles illuminated every corner of the vast front and back yards and portions of the shadowy pecan grove behind the house. Twice, RuthClaire broadcast stentorian warnings over a P.A. system installed for that purpose and once fired her rifle above the heads of the trespassers creeping like animated stick figures across the lawn. Word got around that it was dangerous to try to breach the elaborate fortifications of Paradise Farm. I liked that.
Meanwhile, in the absence of hard facts, speculation and controversy raged. Alistair Patrick Blair, the eminent Zarakali paleoanthropologist, published a paper in Nature denouncing the notion of a surviving Early Pleistocene hominid as “sheer unadulterated grandstanding piffle.” Shrewdly, he did not mention Brian Nollinger by name, not so much to avoid libeling the man, I think, as to deprive him of the satisfaction of seeing his name in print—even in a disparaging context. Blair cited the notorious Piltdown hoax as a model of competent flimflammery next to this tottery ruse, and he argued vigorously that the few available photographs of Adam were of a rather hairy black man in a molded latex mask like those designed for his PBS television series, Beginnings . Nollinger rebutted Blair, or tried to, with a semicoherent essay in Atlanta Fortnightly summarizing the extraordinary diplomatic career of Louis Rutherford and condemning the artist RuthClaire Loyd for her tyrannical imprisonment of the bemused and friendless hominid. She was a female Simon Legree with a mystical bias against both evolutionary theory and the scientific method.
Sermons were preached for and against my ex-wife. Initially, fundamentalists did not know which side to come
“Adam and I installed some blinds. No worry there. The worry’s how long this stupid encirclement will last. I can’t work. Adam’s going to develop a nervous disorder.”
“Let the law run them off. That’s what the law’s for.”
“All right.”
“You could have figured that out for yourself. Why call me for advice?”
“To let you know how much trouble you’ve caused us, you dinkhead.” (But her tone was bantering rather than bitter.) “And another thing besides, Paul.”
“Okay, I’ll bite.”
“Adam’s one failing as a companion is that he can’t talk. Maybe I wanted to hear the silver-throated con man of Beulah Fork do his stuff again.” She let me ruminate on this left-handed compliment for a second or two, then gave me her new telephone number and bade me a peremptory goodbye.
I sat awhile holding the receiver, but finally hung up before Edna Twiggs could break in to tell me I was on the verge of forfeiting continuous service.
International media attention converged on Paradise Farm. Neither the Beulah Fork police department nor the sheriff’s patrol from Tocqueville could handle the journalists, TV people, curiosity seekers, and scientists who descended on Hothlepoya County for a peek at RuthClaire’s habiline paramour. For a time, the Georgia Highway Patrol intervened, rerouting the gate-crashers back toward the interstate and issuing tickets to those who ignored the detour signs; but Ruben Decker and a few of the other residents along the road linking Paradise Farm with town protested that they’d been singled out for citations as often as had the journalists and pesky outsiders plaguing the area, many of whom, when stopped, gave false ID’s to prove their claims of being locals. At last, even the highway patrol threatened to retreat from the scene; this wasn’t their fight.
In desperation RuthClaire contracted with an Atlanta firm to erect a beige brick wall around the exposed sections of her property’s perimeter; and this barricade, upon its completion in May, proved an effective psychological as well as physical deterrent to most of those stopping by for a casual, rather than a mercenary or a malevolent, look-see. Pale arc lights on tall poles illuminated every corner of the vast front and back yards and portions of the shadowy pecan grove behind the house. Twice, RuthClaire broadcast stentorian warnings over a P.A. system installed for that purpose and once fired her rifle above the heads of the trespassers creeping like animated stick figures across the lawn. Word got around that it was dangerous to try to breach the elaborate fortifications of Paradise Farm. I liked that.
Meanwhile, in the absence of hard facts, speculation and controversy raged. Alistair Patrick Blair, the eminent Zarakali paleoanthropologist, published a paper in Nature denouncing the notion of a surviving Early Pleistocene hominid as “sheer unadulterated grandstanding piffle.” Shrewdly, he did not mention Brian Nollinger by name, not so much to avoid libeling the man, I think, as to deprive him of the satisfaction of seeing his name in print—even in a disparaging context. Blair cited the notorious Piltdown hoax as a model of competent flimflammery next to this tottery ruse, and he argued vigorously that the few available photographs of Adam were of a rather hairy black man in a molded latex mask like those designed for his PBS television series, Beginnings . Nollinger rebutted Blair, or tried to, with a semicoherent essay in Atlanta Fortnightly summarizing the extraordinary diplomatic career of Louis Rutherford and condemning the artist RuthClaire Loyd for her tyrannical imprisonment of the bemused and friendless hominid. She was a female Simon Legree with a mystical bias against both evolutionary theory and the scientific method.
Sermons were preached for and against my ex-wife. Initially, fundamentalists did not know which side to come
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