Ancient of Days by Michael Bishop

also helped to explain the blatancy with which the Zealous High Zygote’s cohorts on Main Street had assaulted the West Bank and then made good their getaway. If Davie was with them, then they’d had a free hand. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, Davie had never seemed quite so pale and etiolated as this apparition.
    “Time to go,” E(lvis) L(amar) Teavers said.
    “Where?” RuthClaire asked.
    But now that Zubowicz and Nollinger were secured, the urge to banter with or taunt us deserted the intruders. Grimly unspeaking, they herded us out the back door, past the restroom, and through the grass-grown alley to a small dewy hillock from which Beulah Fork’s water tower rose into the summer darkness like a war machine out of H. G. Wells. Adam stared up into the tower’s crisscrossing support rods, but Teavers, sensing that Adam had it in mind to seek refuge aloft, cracked him across the temple with his shotgun barrel.
    “Go on, you goddamn hibber!” he cried. “No hibberish monkey business!”
    As Nollinger had done in the restaurant, Adam fell to his knees. His lips curled back to reveal his canines. RuthClaire knelt beside him to whisper consolation. Although Adam wobbled a little after regaining his feet, he was soon striding as assuredly as any of us, and our bizarre little party passed from the water tower’s low hillock into an asphalt-patched street parallel to Main.
    From this street we marched into the upper reaches of the playground of the Beulah Fork Elementary School. Crickets were whirring enthusiastically, but otherwise the town seemed uninhabited, a vast sound stage accommodating the silhouettes of a few isolated Victorian houses along with hundreds of cardboard-cutout elm and magnolia trees. The playground itself, on the other hand, was a minefield in the midst of these innocuous props. Crossing it, I kept waiting for Teavers to blow our heads off. It seemed clear to me that he and his purple-capped pals were marching us to fatal appointments, or, at the very least, to a tryst with tar and feathers.
    “Is this how you look after the rights of a hardworking white man?” I asked. “Wrecking his business and terrorizing him and his friends?”
    “Shut up,” Craig Puddicombe said.
    “I mean, when you came in the other night, you were concerned about my rights being violated. Is this how—?”
    E. L. Teavers said: “That’s all forfeit, Mr. Loyd. You and your wife are traitors.”
    “To what?” RuthClaire asked.
    “I said, ‘Shut up!’” Puddicombe said. “We don’t have to explain nothin’ to you!”
    “Not now, maybe,” Teavers added, evenly enough.
    And then I saw a van parked behind the softball backstop at the northeastern corner of the playground. Two or three robed figures stood beside this vehicle, human carrion birds in the still unsettled dust surrounding it. The cab of a pickup protruded beyond the nose of the van. Its decorated sides the Klanners had obscured with a thick gouache of mud that had long since dried and hardened. As we approached, one robed figure semaphored with both arms, climbed into the van, and eased it along the backstop so that Teavers and Puddicombe could throw back its sliding door and prod their captives inside. Adam and RuthClaire boarded together while I temporized on the threshold, one foot in the dust as an uncertain tie to the reality of Hothlepoya County. These clownish thugs were about to spirit us away to Never-Never Land.
    “Get in,” somebody said, not too urgently.
    I obeyed, but looked over my shoulder in time to see the man in jogging shoes go dogtrotting off toward a portable classroom behind the school. Puddicombe climbed in after me and banged the van’s sliding door to. RuthClaire, Adam, and I were made to sit on the floor in the center of the vehicle’s passenger section. Around us perched armed members of the Kudzu Klavern, four more people caparisoned in cumbersome purple and redolent of stale sweat. The darkness prevented me