Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  At the Montaraz house, only a few minutes later, RuthClaire ran to Adam and embraced him. I stood just inside the door connecting the kitchen to the big downstairs studio. The other three men present were Bilker Moody and the same pair of GBI agents who had driven RuthClaire and me back to the Snyder property on the day after our abduction from the West Bank: Niedrach and Davison. They wore nondescript business suits of flimsy black cotton, almost as if they had picked their outfits off the same rack. Davison, however, sported a beige Banlon shirt under his jacket, while Niedrach had made his own distinguishing fashion statement with a red clip-on tie and a red canvas belt on whose buckle shone the embossed head of the mascot of the University of Georgia, a bulldog wearing a freshman’s beanie.

  Bilker’s opinion of the GBI agents revealed itself in the curl of his upper lip.

  At last Adam and RuthClaire separated, and RuthClaire reintroduced everyone. I gave Niedrach the cassette on which I’d recorded Craig’s ransom demands. A tape player was produced, and the GBI men sat down to listen to the cassette. Bilker retreated to the bar, Adam paced, and RuthClaire perched on the arm of the divan beside Niedrach. I squatted opposite the divan on the other side of the marble coffee table.

  “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 . . .” And so on, to the end.

  Niedrach said, “That’s by far the craziest set of ransom demands I’ve ever heard.”

  Sitting hunched on a high-gloss red bar stool, Bilker drawled, “The reason you’re dumfuzzled is that this ain’t a kidnapping anymore.”

  Niedrach raised his eyebrows. “No? What is it, then? A dope deal?”

  “A hostage situation.”

  “Every kidnap victim is a hostage,” Niedrach countered with as much tact as he could muster. “That’s tautological.”

  “Yeah. Logical ’cause you’ve been taught it. But a hostage situation’s different from a kidnappin’. Money ain’t the perpetrator’s number-one priority. It’s the pursuit of a far-out political or ideological goal by means of terroristic threats.”

  “He told us they wouldn’t kill Paulie,” RuthClaire said.

  Bilker revolved a half-turn this way, a half-turn the other. Because of his bulk, I half expected the legs of the stool to screw curls of hardwood up around themselves as they sank into the floor. “Yeah, well, Puddicombe’s cooler than any kidnapper ’cause the Great White Jehovah, Jumper of Jigaboos, is on his side. He’ll take more chances than a two-bit kidnapper. If you push him, he’ll raise the stakes.”

  “The stakes he’s playing for are revenge,” I said.

  “Mebbe so. But he gets it by makin’ us dance to his fiddlin’, not by crashin’ the Montarazes’ bank accounts.”

  “So?” said Niedrach.

  “We better dance to his fiddlin’. Or make it look like we are. Otherwise, he’ll—pardon me, Mrs. Montaraz—he’ll off his hostage.”

  Davison said, “How do you know so much about it?”

  “Mebbe I watch the CBS Evening News.”

  Niedrach stood and pocketed his hands. “Mr. Moody’s pegged this exactly right. Now we know it’s a kidnapping—or a hostage situation involving a kidnap victim—the FBI will assume primary responsibility for the case. We’ve got to contact them.”

  “But you and Mr. Davison have been through this with us before,” RuthClaire said. “The FBI won’t dump you fellows completely, will they?”

  “I’ll try to make that point, Mrs. Montaraz, in telling them what’s happened so far. Meantime, though, Adam—Mr. Montaraz, I mean—should move out, to give every appearance of complying with the sickies’ demands. Mr. Moody’s right about that.”

  Bilker grunted, startled to find an ally where he’d posited a bungling bureaucrat.

  RuthClaire said, “I can’t believe Nancy’d let anything happen to Paulie.”

  “Nancy may be in as much danger as your son,” Niedrach said.

  And so it was decided that Adam would leave the house on Hurt Street. Niedrach would have a secretary at the state GBI offices telephone the Atlanta newspapers with an anonymous tip about the deteriorating marital situation of the Montarazes. She would claim to be a neighbor with firsthand knowledge of their troubles, including a confidence from RuthClaire that her husband had agreed to a trial separation requiring his immediate departure from the household. RuthClaire would grant the papers a tight-lipped interview omitting any mention of the abduction and confirming the anonymous friend’s separation story.

  “But a separation on what grounds?” RuthClaire pleaded.

  “Anything you can think of that doesn’t strike you as unseemly,” Niedrach said.

  Adam tried to speak, but his gravelly computer voice would not cooperate, and he reverted to sign language. RuthClaire interpreted it for us. “Career incompatibility,” she said. “We’ve been arguing about Adam’s career plans. I want him to keep painting, but he wishes to enroll—” she struggled to read his gestures correctly— “in the Candler School of Theology at Emory. He wishes to take the curriculum leading to the Master of Theological Studies degree. I’ll tell the reporter that Adam has gone off the deep end on matters God-related.”

  “That’s great,” Niedrach said. “That’s inspired.”

  Davison grimaced. “A habiline religious nut?” Yes. Apparently so. The point of the ruse, of course, was to get word to Craig that RuthClaire and Adam had stopped living together. The story’s appearance in print would insure its finding its way onto local TV news broadcasts, where Craig could monitor recent muggings, rapes, street-name changes, city-council shouting matches, and mayoral trips overseas.

  “What’s the chance of the media catchin’ wind of the kidnappin’ itself?” Bilker asked.

  “Dust-ups at Sinusoid Disturbances are a regular thing,” Davison replied. “We’re in the clear for now.”

  Niedrach said, “Puddicombe may break the news himself. Publicity doesn’t worry him. He might even like it. So if the story leaks, Paulie won’t be in any more—or any less—danger than he already is.”

  Where was Adam going to move to? We mulled the options. He needed a shelter offering privacy as well as a certain remoteness from the urban bustle of Atlanta. What qualified? A rented house in Alpharetta? A lakeside cottage in Cherokee County? The monastery in Conyers?

  “Let him come to Paradise Farm with me,” I suggested.

  RuthClaire said, “Wouldn’t Craig look askance at that? You’re my ex-husband. You’re also Paulie’s godfather.”

  “Two castoffs commiserating,” I said. “It’s honky-on-hibber marriage that upsets Puddicombe, not white and black males cohabiting.”

  “What would that do to our cover story about his decision to attend the Candler School of Theology?”

  Adam signed again, and RuthClaire said, “It’s too late to enroll for summer term there, and fall semester doesn’t officially start until the last Monday in August.”

  “So the alibi holds,” Niedrach said. “Take him with you, Mr. Loyd. We’ve got an agent in Hothlepoya County investigating the drug scene there. He’ll act as a go-between, relaying information from us to you and vice versa. So go on.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as he can get ready to go. Now, if possible.”

  RuthClaire and Adam climbed upstairs to get him packed for his stay at Paradise Farm, and to tell each other goodbye. Bilker and the GBI agents, discreetly embarrassed by this turn of events, huddled in the kitchen drinking coffee and swapping companionable tall tales about their prowess as bodyguards and their expertise as sleuths.

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” I told them.

  Davison, who had draped his black jacket over his chair, blurted, “An hour? Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  “To tell somebody goodbye.”

  I drove to Caroline’s—not in her little blue beetle, but in my big silver Mercedes. I arrived at 9:37 A.M., bleary-eyed, funky, and anxious about the deadl
ine I’d set myself. An hour? I now had only forty-six minutes. It might take me that long to convince my hapless generative equipment that it could still pretend to that title. It might take me longer to convince the lovely Caroline to let me try to convince my equipment. Wasn’t I presuming too much?

  Staggering along the walk to her porch, I felt that I was bound in a pair of tinfoil shorts. I itched. I had not slept all night. My stubbly beard seemed to be infested with microscopic lumberjacks sawing away at every follicle. Who—whom—was I kidding? I had no chance with this lady.

  Forty-four minutes.

  At last at her door, I leaned with one elbow and all my bathetic longing into the tiny button that rang her bell—her dear, melodious bell. Inside her apartment chimed the opening eight notes of “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind. They chimed over and over again because I was too weary to pull back my elbow.

  Forty-three minutes.

  “Who is it?” Caroline’s voice cried.

  “Me.”

  She opened the three inches her safety-chain allowed. “What do you want?”

  “A friendly fee-fi-fo-fum.”

  “Has anything happened? Have they found Paulie?”

  I tried to alchemize my weary nonchalance into concerned sobriety. “Listen, Caroline, if you’ll—”

  “That’s not my car,” she said, peering past me. “How am I going to get my car home?” She shook her head. “Damn! That’s not important. The important thing is Paulie. I’m still three-quarters asleep.”

  “If you’ll let me in, I’ll tell you all I—”

  Caroline unhooked the chain. The door opened, and she was standing against a backdrop of framed Broadway posters, porcelain flower vases, and at least two copper umbrella holders. The breath of the apartment’s air-conditioning rippled over me. As for Caroline herself, she wore a yellow dressing gown that seemed to be lined with layer upon liquid-thin layer of an even paler material. She looked and smelled like the demigoddess of a fragrant wheat field.

  “You have to shower. And talk to me. And eat breakfast here.”

  “Forty-one minutes,” I said. “I’ve got forty-one minutes.”

  “Listen, Mr. Loyd, there’s a clock in every room but the bathroom. You can hang your watch on the shower spigot for all I care. If you have any sense, though, you’ll forget about your stupid forty-one minutes and put your watch in one of your shoes.” She pulled me inside and shut us both into her apartment’s Fundy Bay briskness.

  As matters unfolded, I put my Elgin in one of my shoes and deliberately forgot about it.

  I spent more than forty-one minutes at Caroline’s. I spent more than eighty-two minutes at Caroline’s. In fact, I didn’t make it back to Hurt Street until better than two hours after my departure—but neither Bilker nor the GBI agents scolded me, for Caroline, fetching in old jeans and a bright yellow tank top, had accompanied me. She had to pick up her VW, didn’t she? Further, as a witness to the crime, she wished to accommodate Niedrach and Davison by recounting the event from her point of view. Wouldn’t they have sought her out eventually, anyway? They admitted they would have.

  “And RuthClaire might like having another woman around for a while today,” I said. “It won’t be easy for her with Adam gone and only Bilker’s shoulder to cry on.”

  Bilker snorted, in agreement rather than indignation.

  And when the Montarazes came downstairs, RuthClaire and Caroline embraced like long-lost siblings unexpectedly reunited, and as they did, Adam and I carried his belongings out to my car for the trip to Beulah Fork. Bilker lent a hand. Even on its high-performance shocks, the rear of my Mercedes began to sag. Adam had added to his own luggage at least three dozen of RuthClaire’s more recent paintings. Although fairly small, the canvases were still affixed to their frames, and Bilker and I had to struggle to wedge them into the trunk between the suitcases and the pasteboard boxes.

  “Adam, what’s the point of taking the paintings?”

  “Remembrance,” he gargled.

  Because it hurt for him to speak, I did not question him further—but it occurred to me that he was preparing for a long separation from RuthClaire. This was not a surrender to despair, though, but an act of faith. If he and his wife were to be reunited with their child, they would have to accede to and endure the stipulations of the kidnappers. With luck, the GBI might break the case, but there was no guarantee.

  These paintings—the drab acrylics she’d hopefully entitled Souls—still seemed to me the least distinguished work of RuthClaire’s career: blatant mediocrities. Only a uxorious husband could love them. I scratched my head. Adam was not the uxorious sort, but his fondness for this series—when, for “remembrances,” he could have taken better examples of his wife’s art—truly puzzled me.

  We got away from Atlanta shortly after noon. On our drive down, Adam read. He had a stack of hardcover titles on the floorboard, and he seemed to pick up and peruse a new one every fifteen minutes or so. Does God Exist? and Eternal Life? by Hans Küng, God and the Astronomers by Robert Jastrow, God and the New Physics by Paul Davies, The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman, Mind and Nature by Gregory Bateson, an anthology entitled The Mind’s I by a pair of editors whose names escape me. I don’t know what all else. I had the impression that Adam was sampling these texts, checking passages that he’d underlined in previous readings, rather than trying to devour each volume whole for the first time—but even this formidable intellectual feat had its intimidating aspects. Out of respect for his admirable focus, I kept my mouth shut.

  At Paradise Farm, unloading, I broke my quirky vow of silence: “Adam, you know the story you told RuthClaire to tell the reporter about your reasons for separating?” He raised his eyebrows. “The one about entering the seminary this fall?”

  “Yes?” he croaked.

  “That alleged fiction came to you so quickly, I wondered if . . . well, if it might really be something you’d like to try.”

  “Oh, yes,” he managed. “I. Have. Thought. About. It.”

  Livia George, Hazel Upchurch, and our latest little waitress from Tocqueville Junior College did not jump for joy on my return. An hour earlier, a tour bus from Muscadine Gardens had dropped off forty people at the West Bank. These people had descended like a flock of crows, eaten a dozen different menu items, left a skimpy collective tip, and flown away in their bus with a rude backfire.

  “Did you give them the substitutes they wanted?”

  Livia George sat spraddle-legged at a table near the cash register. “Don’ I always, Mistah Paul?”

  “Everybody was taken care of?”

  She gave me a disgusted look. “We turned you a pretty profit, and we done been doin’ that the whole live-long week. You jes’ like a man runs up to put out a fire when it’s awreddy burnt down his house.”

  “Livvy, you say the sweetest things.”

  “How’s Mistah Adam?” she asked, sitting up straight to wipe her brow. “How’s Miss RuthClaire?”

  “Fine,” I lied. “Fine.”

  I made some noises about the apparent success of Adam’s operation, but beyond that partial truth I could not comfortably go. To prevent any further discussion of the matter, I helped clean up the restaurant and stayed on for the five-o’clock dinner crowd. Our receipts for the day were encouraging, and I drove Livia George home without once mentioning that I had a guest in my house.

  Next morning, closer to noon than to sunup, the TV set downstairs awakened me.

  I knotted my terrycloth robe at my waist and stumbled barefoot down the steps to find Adam cross-legged on the floor with a section of the Sunday Journal-Constitution strewn around him and my RCA XL-100’s screen flickering with ill-defined violet and magenta images of Dwight “Happy” McElroy’s Great Gospel Giveaway broadcast.

  “‘This is my story, this is my song,’ ” sang the hundred-member choir behind McElroy. “‘Praising my Savior all the day long!’ ”

  Sho
ts of the choir alternated with wide-angle pans of the congregation in McElroy’s huge Televangelism Center in Rehoboth, Louisiana. This soaring, baroquely buttressed structure had been paid for by the four-bit to five-dollar donations of hundreds of thousands of low-income subscribers to the doctrinal guidelines of the Greater Christian Constituency of America, Inc. Despite the raddled colors on my picture tube, I could see that attending the service were more enraptured souls than you could usually find at the Omni during an Atlanta Hawks basketball game. Seven thousand people? Ten? However many there were, they must have converged on Rehoboth from every city and hamlet on the Gulf Coast, not excluding Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Biloxi, and Mobile. The blessed place rocked.

  “Ah,” I said. “Your favorite show.”

  Adam had already dressed: a pair of light brown bush shorts and an orange T-shirt celebrating the pleasures of River Street in Savannah. He handed me a section of the paper called “The Arts.”

  “Turn first page,” he growled, but, overnight, his speech had become more fluid.

  I obeyed. What greeted my eye on the inside page was this headline:

  MARRIAGE OF WORLD-FAMOUS ATLANTA ARTISTS ON SKIDS

  OWING TO HABILINE’S DECISION TO ATTEND SEMINARY

  Beside the brief story was a file photograph of Adam and RuthClaire in “happier times,” namely, at the opening of his Abraxas show in February. My face was a smudge of dots among other ill-defined faces in the background.