Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

“I don’t know RuthClaire. I don’t know Adam. For that matter, I really don’t know you. It crossed my mind—just briefly—that this might be a, you know, a publicity stunt. To promote their art and David Blau’s gallery.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Look, Paul, I know it’s backasswards and egotistical, but for a moment I was afraid I was being made sport of.”

  “Sport of? What do you mean, sport of?”

  “Not after the police arrived. And not really before, either, but nothing that happened at the club seemed real. I felt like an outsider, someone not getting the joke.”

  “What cynicism! Five minutes ago you were berating me for hoping for a friendly fuck on the same evening my godson gets abducted!”

  “Paul, I was confessing a doubt I had, not leveling an accusation. You’re turning this into something it isn’t.”

  I was thoroughly confused. Our conversation had gone off the rails with her plea not to take her next remark wrong. Had I taken it wrong, or had she impugned RuthClaire and Adam’s integrity as artists and parents? I thumbed an antacid tablet out of a roll in my pants pocket and slipped it under my tongue.

  “Take me home, Paul. You don’t need me at the hospital. Adam doesn’t need me there, either. I’m sorry this has happened—deeply, deeply sorry.”

  I took her home, to an apartment complex on Clifton, not far from the Emory campus. My attempts to get her talking again met with monosyllabic rebuffs. She had wounded me by taking potshots at my friends. I had wounded her by calling her to account for her meanness and vanity.

  Caroline’s apartment building had pinkish stucco walls, gables with casement windows, and rustic Tudor trim. I parked beside the walk to her front porch, but before I could even undo my seat buckle, she got out. Then she leaned back down and gave a harsh barking little laugh.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I was about to tell you how much I enjoyed the evening.”

  “Oh.”

  “Parts of it, I did.” She slammed the door and hiked up her walk like a drill sergeant in the Scandinavian Fashion Force. I waited until she was safely inside before giving a salute and driving wistfully away.

  “He’s awake,” the nurse on Adam’s floor said when I showed up at the hospital to fulfill my role as Evil Messenger. “He doesn’t sleep that much anyway, but after Mrs. Montaraz called to tell us you were coming, I went to see if he needed to be awakened. He didn’t.” A middle-aged woman with strong features and eyes like indigo marbles, the nurse tilted her head. “Is there anything I can do, Mr. Loyd?”

  “Make sure we’re not disturbed for a while.”

  The nurse could not contain herself. “What’s wrong?”

  “If RuthClaire didn’t tell you when she called, then I can’t tell you.” My words came out, unintentionally, like a reprimand. I patted the woman’s shoulder to soften their impact. Then I walked down the long, antiseptic corridor.

  Adam was sitting up in bed in the dark. He had two pillows behind him, and his legs were crossed beneath his sheet in the lotus position of an Oriental contemplative. The IV bottle beside him, its tube running to his wrist like a life-giving amber fuse, glinted eerily in the darkness. The bandages on his lower face gave him the look of an unfinished plaster-of-Paris bust. He sat remarkably still, and I felt as I had felt as a small boy, approaching my father after some terrible disobedience. I did not reach for the light switch—maybe for reasons of self-concealment. I stood in the doorway letting my eyes adjust and noticing with what stoic endurance Adam’s own eyes tried to allay my fears. Somehow, he had sensed them, like a faint but acrid odor. Don’t quail from necessity, his eyes said. Come sit down.

  I crossed the room and sat down in the chair that RuthClaire ordinarily used. But I must have appeared ready to bolt, for Adam lifted the arm attached to the IV tube and gently patted me, as I had patted the nurse.

  Go ahead, he was telling me: Be as brutal as your news demands.

  “RuthClaire would have come to tell you this, Adam, but circumstances don’t allow. I’m her emissary. I’m here to tell you what nobody—not even your own wife—could tell you easily.”

  Adam made a series of signs that somehow permitted me to interpret them.

  “No one’s died. So far as we know. Tiny Paul’s been taken.” And I told him in detail what had happened at Sinusoid Disturbances and afterward, including the police’s conviction that we would soon receive a ransom demand and my own speculations about the identities of the kidnappers. At the moment, though, everyone was walking gingerly across a rope bridge over a chasm of indeterminate depth. We would not be able to see how far it was to the bottom until Craig Puddicombe or Nancy Teavers called. Lamely, I concluded, “All we can do is wait.”

  Adam pulled the IV tube free of the plastic connector in his wrist and lifted himself up high enough to hook the tube over its pole. There, it ceased to drip. My friend wore one of those hospital gowns with the split up the rear, a design feature of curious motivation. Was the split to make it easier for orderlies to administer enemas, or was it a sartorial aid to patients frequently victimized by sudden diarrhea attacks? These seemed mutually exclusive goals, but the gowns were an immemorial hospital humiliation. Adam managed to wear his without looking totally ridiculous (maybe because nudity held no terror for him), but when he hopped nimbly down from his bed in the garment, I found myself glancing around the room in search of a safety pin with which to close up the vent in back. At Sinusoid Disturbances, I would have had no trouble finding one.

  “Adam, what are you doing?”

  He brushed past me to the sink and mounted a stair-step stool allowing access to his image in the mirror. His hairy buttocks peeked through the split, and the backs of his thighs tightened and relaxed as he raised and lowered himself on tiptoes. I then realized he was undoing the gauzy cerements binding the lower half of his face.

  “Adam!”

  He shot me a warning look and resumed unpackaging his jaw. He had already dropped the foam-rubber cup for his chin into the sink. Only the light spilling in from the corridor enabled him to work, but he was peeling off layer after layer with an alacrity that suggested he knew his business. Had he practiced for a moment such as this? It hardly seemed likely, but how else account for the knowledgeable speed of his fingers?

  I whispered, “Adam, there’s nothing any of us can do until they call.”

  His fingers slowed, but he kept unpeeling gauze.

  “What if the kidnappers ring up the nurses’ station instead of the house? If you rush home to RuthClaire, there’ll be nobody here to take their call—nobody who can respond to their demands.” I was improvising, but the possibility sounded realistic to me. “You couldn’t talk to them, of course, but you could authorize me to act as spokesman. Think about it, Adam. Somebody has to be here.”

  He shrugged my hand away and finished taking off his bandages. I looked at him in profile. His nose seemed less flat, his cheekbones higher, his chin more pronounced. Not only had the plastic surgeons reconstructed his buccal cavity, they’d given his entire face a modern configuration. None of the changes was severe or blatant, but together they gave him a streamlined, Nilotic handsomeness.

  Adam dismounted his stool so that I towered over him again, embarrassed by my moronic tallness. From a hamper he seized a pair of clean white towels, which he folded double and spread out on the floor by the bed. He nodded me down. I knelt on one of the towels, and he, of course, knelt on the other, turning me back into Goliath to his humble shepherd boy.

  But, side by side, we prayed. Or, Adam prayed while I knelt beside him with my brow pressed against the mattress edge. “Pray without ceasing,” it says in Thessalonians, but I couldn’t get past the part about forgiving-our-trespasses-as-we-forgive-those-who-trespass, etc., without thinking about Nancy’s perfidy, Caroline’s presumption that the kidnapping was a publicity stunt, or my need to resume my responsibilities at the West Bank. Pray without ceasing? I could do no better th
an an intermittent, “Don’t let the bastards kill him, God,” between which times I fantasized slitting Craig’s throat, taking Caroline to bed, and catering the reception of a wedding party at Muscadine Gardens—not necessarily in that order or all at once. My knees got sore, my kidneys ached, but somehow I shared Adam’s vigil on the floor for almost three hours.

  At 3:57 A.M.—I checked my watch—the nurse came to the door to report that Adam had a telephone call.

  “I tried to tell him that this was an absurd hour to call,” she said, “but he told me if I didn’t fetch Mr. Montaraz, I’d ‘live to regret it.’ ”

  “It’s Puddicombe,” I whispered. Aloud I said, “We’ll be down there in two minutes. Go back and tell him.” My heart leapt against my rib cage. Too often, the parents of stolen children hear nothing from the abductors. A break like this one—a break I’d desperately anticipated—was a kind of sardonic miracle.

  The nurse left. I banged my forehead against the mattress in despairing joy. The son of a bitch had telephoned! I rocked back on my heels and mouthed a silent thank you. Adam touched my shoulder.

  “God. Bless. You,” he managed.

  I gaped at him. Adam had spoken, and never had I heard a voice so oddly pitched and modulated: a scratchy computer struggling to sound human. Impulsively, I hugged the little man. Holding him at arm’s length, I told him he’d better put on a pair of pants. If we were too long getting to the nurses’ station, Puddicombe—or whoever it was—would get antsy about the delay and hang up. I rubbed two fingers along the side of my nose. They came away wet.

  A pair of khaki trousers his only clothing, Adam accompanied me to the nurses’ station. The duty nurse waited for us with her hand over the telephone mouthpiece.

  “Is there an extension?” I said.

  She nodded at the glass-walled office behind the counter. “In there. If you want to, you can cradle the receiver on a speaker device, and it’ll broadcast like a radio.”

  “Good,” I said. “You don’t happen to have a tape recorder too, do you?”

  “Another nurse, Andrea, has a jam box, a big silver thing she hauls around to deafen her elders with. It also records. Andrea leaves her tapes in the drawer. You can tape over one of those—if you take responsibility for ruining a favorite of hers.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  At which point the nurse realized that Adam’s face was free of its bandages. “Oh, my God! Those weren’t supposed to come off yet. Dr. Ruggiero will flay me alive.”

  “No, he won’t,” I said. “Mr. Montaraz is healing nicely.”

  I led Adam into the office, found the jam box, rummaged up an unmarked tape, put it in the machine, and pressed the record button. Then I set the telephone receiver into the amplifier unit and depressed the lighted button on the base of the telephone. The nurse, having observed all this through the glass, hung up her phone and left to make a tour of the floor—efficient and discreet, that good woman.

  “We’re here,” I told the caller.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” he asked, two syllables that identified him: Craig Puddicombe. He had made no effort to disguise his voice. (If the restaurant business ever got too tame for me, maybe I could go into police work.)

  I told Craig who I was.

  “The first dude in history to let a hibber snake his old lady.”

  “We were divorced when RuthClaire married Adam.”

  “Yeah. You even played pimp for ’em, didn’t you? Now you’re in the hospital holding the hibber’s hand. Jesus, Mr. Loyd, you take the cake.”

  “But you and Nancy took the child. What do you—?”

  Puddicombe broke in: “Get your tape recorders all set up? Get a call off to the police? That why you took so goddamn long pickin’ up the phone?”

  “Adam had to dress. His room’s at the far—”

  “Stuff that, Mr. Loyd.” He said something to somebody in the room with him, but it was all muffled, indistinct. Then: “Prove to me the hibber’s really there.”

  “How? You know he can’t talk.”

  “He can sing, can’t he? He can hum like a rotary engine.”

  “Craig, he’s had an operation. His face is bandaged. The entire lower portion of his face was remodeled.”

  “He’ll still be stump-ugly to me. Have him hum through his bandages.”

  I started to protest, but Adam took my handkerchief from my coat pocket, tied it around his face as a bandanna, and stepped to the amplifier to hum a Cokesbury hymn.

  “That’s the hibber, all right—a mule brayin’ into a barrel.”

  “Prove you’ve got Tiny Paul,” I said.

  “How? You wanna hear him scream?”

  Adam stopped humming—half lament, half yodel—and removed the bandanna. He shook his head in response to Craig’s last question.

  “Never mind,” I said. “What do you want?”

  “A ransom. If Mister and Missus Hibber give it to us, they’ll get their filthy little whatever-it-is back.”

  “How much money, Craig?”

  “Who said anything about money?”

  This reply shocked me. What sort of ransom required no monetary payoff?

  “Y’all still there?” Craig asked.

  “Tell us your terms. We’re listening.”

  Craig consulted with his accomplice. Then, as if reading from a script, he said, “We don’t want money. We don’t do violence. What we want is what’s right. You may think the brat’s been taken because his hibber daddy killed E. L. You may think we covet what the brat’s unnatural family has built up for itself since the hibber did that killin’. It ain’t so, though, neither of those things. We took the brat to make some undone justice get done. We took him to set some wrong things right.”

  This nonsense scared me. “Come on, Craig, get to the point.”

  “Have a little patience,” the amplifier said, mockingly polite. A paper rattled. “You get your little half-breed back if and when you do the following. First, Mister and Missus Hibber they stop livin’ together. Second, they tell the papers and the TV they’ve stopped and they regret the sinful example they’ve set decent whites and blacks all over the world by bringin’ their mongrel brat into it. Third, they—”

  “Craig,” I pleaded.

  “Third, they apologize to the parents, family, and widow of E. L. Teavers, my friend. And fourth, the hibber gives himself up for trial on charges of—” a meaningful pause—“uh, malicious homicide.”

  “Craig, E. L. was trying to kill Adam. You and your crew had kidnapped us, for God’s sake—the same way you and Nancy have abducted Tiny Paul. Not a court in the world would convict Adam of anything but saving all our lives!”

  “Look, we was just tryin’ to scare some sense into you. Nobody out to Snyder’s place was gonna get kilt—until your goddamn hibber chucked E. L. down that hole.”

  “But E. L. was trying to do that to Adam, Craig!”

  “Puttin’ your hibber down a hole didn’t kill him, did it? Him and his kind lived hundreds of damn centuries in caves. So puttin’ a hibber down a brick-kiln hole hurts it ’bout as much as tossin’ Br’er Rabbit into a damn briar patch. He popped back out, didn’t he? That proves it.”

  Absurd. Puddicombe and I were working from entirely different sets of premises. I changed tacks: “Is that it? Four things to do to get T. P. back?”

  “We got a fifth un.” Our tormentor rattled his prepared text. “Inasmuch as Mister and Missus Hibber have made big bucks from the dirty degenerates of American society, and are richer than all but the upright and godly ought to be, they’ve got to—” Craig halted. His fancy lead-in had taken some steam out of his delivery. “Inasmuch as all that, they’ve got to contribute fifty thousand dollars to ten different charities and political groups of our choosing. They’ll get the list on Monday or Tuesday. Each group gets at least three thousand, but—and this is big of us, now—Mister and Missus Hibber get to decide how to ladle out the twenty thousand left over after the first split.”

>   “Money. It comes down to money.”

  “The money ain’t important, Mr. Loyd. It’s not for us, anyhow. It’s only ’cause they got it and don’t deserve it and need to give it to somebody who does—that’s why we’re makin’ ’em do it. They do it by check, too. We need to see the canceled checks as proof that everything’s been done like we asked. The list comin’ in the mail will explain the whole system.”

  Angry, I said: “They won’t get T. P. back until the canceled checks come in?”

  “Actually, not till after they’ve split up, broken their ungodly marriage, and lived apart long enough to show us they’ve really done it.”

  “Craig, give us a time frame? How long will you hold Tiny Paul? There’s no give-and-take here. For you, it’s open-ended. For RuthClaire and Adam, it’s a nightmare. And if they’re living apart when you release the kid, who will you release him to?”

  “To your ex-old lady, of course. The hibber don’t have any rights in this.”

  “But how long, Craig. Play fair, damn it!”

  “They’ll know when we do, won’t they?” And he hung up. The speaker on the amplifier was amplifying a dial tone. No way to trace the call. It had come through the hospital’s central switching system. So Craig Puddicombe and Nancy Teavers, with T. P. in their doubtful care, had sunk again into the impenetrable anonymity of a metropolitan area with nearly four million people—if they hadn’t made their call from Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, or one of the Carolinas. And even if they were still in Greater Atlanta, they had more than a hundred square miles of labyrinthine territory in which to go to ground.

  Adam slumped into the chair at the desk. His voice, when he spoke, was a series of agonized croaks: “I wish. Miss RuthClaire. Had let. McElroy. Baptize him.”

  Adam decided to leave Emory Hospital. While I telephoned RuthClaire, he dressed, packed a suitcase, and faced down the bemused night nurse with a painful repetition of the words, “Goodbye, goodbye. Going now.” During this confrontation, he maintained the dignified decorum of a Japanese charge d’affaires. When I got off the phone, the nurse put through a hasty call to one of Adam’s doctors, who at first voiced angry opposition to our plans to decamp at this hour. Talking to me, though, he at last gave his reluctant consent, and the orderlies who had been summoned to keep Adam and me from hijacking an elevator to freedom backed off. The nurse then rode downstairs with us, reminding Adam to eat nothing chewier than oatmeal until Dr. Ruggiero had examined him again and noting that he would not be able to speak as well as he wished until he had undergone his scheduled speech therapy.