Ancient of Days

by Michael Bishop

  “That was quick, wasn’t it?”

  I read the story. It quoted RuthClaire to the effect that Adam’s pursuit of spiritual fulfillment had left him little time for either Tiny Paul or her. She still loved him, but that very love insisted that she give him what he most wanted, a chance to study at Candler without family encumbrances. She wanted to support him in his quest for a theological degree, but all he wanted was complete freedom. No one alive fully understood the habiline mind, but in some ways Adam’s outlook was that of a medieval ascetic with a calling for the priesthood. Had she not intercepted him on his northward trek through Georgia two years ago, almost certainly he would have discovered his spiritual bent without first marrying.

  Adam grunted. “She does not add. That ‘almost certainly.’ I would have. Stayed a naked animal.”

  “Never mind. You still end up looking like a horse’s butt, Adam.”

  “‘A horse’s butt?’ ”

  “What kind of man leaves his wife and son to study religion? Jesus.”

  “I do not care. How I end up. Looking. To people who do not know me.”

  “You just want Paulie back?”

  “Yes.”

  On Gospel Giveaway, the words of McElroy’s sermon rolled from him like Gulf Coast combers in hurricane season, powerful, dangerous, unrelenting. (Of course, there was also the ever-present inset of the woman interpreting the sermon for deaf viewers, her hands flashing like hungry seagulls.) Suddenly, though, McElroy held up a copy of the same section of the Atlanta paper now in my own hands.

  “. . . a continuing assault on the American family,” he thundered, waving the newspaper at his auditors. “I’d planned to apologize today for my overzealousness last summer in castigatin’ the former RuthClaire Loyd for livin’ in sin with a male creature not her husband. Well, it’s long since become evident to everybody that this so-called creature is a man. He and Miss RuthClaire were in fact husband and wife at the time of their apparent illicit cohabitation. That bein’ so, they deserved an apology. Why, this past week I visited Adam Montaraz at a hospital in Atlanta, laid my hands square on his head, and baptized him into the everlastin’ glory and the ever-glorious communion of the Body of Christ. Say Amen!”

  The people in the Televangelism Center roared, “Amen!”

  “At the same time, I unburdened my spirit of its load of guilt and sorrow to both Montarazes, callin’ upon them to forgive me in the great and gracious name of Jesus Christ. And did they forgive me? I believe they did, and I went away fully convicted that here were two righteous human bein’s saved from sin and despair by faith in God and their humble devotion to each other.”

  “To God give the glory!” a member of the audience cried.

  “But this morning I read that this same couple, so concerned and carin’ only five days ago, has fallen to the epidemic of sundered relationships ravagin’ our country the way the plague once ravaged Europe! This story wounds me so bad because RuthClaire Montaraz has broken her marriage for one incredible reason—nothing more terrible than her husband’s desire to . . . to study for the ministry!”

  The congregation groaned collectively.

  Adam sprang up from the floor and punched the button turning the set off. “That. Son. Of. Bitch,” he enunciated.

  “RuthClaire didn’t let him baptize T. P. He resents her for that, Adam. He’s trying to get back at her.”

  “He has. Misread the story. I am the one. Who has deserted my family.”

  “Adam, it’s all a fabrication. Everything in that story.”

  Adam struggled to explain himself: “But he has misread, even, the fabrication. A person working for a Master of Theological Studies . . . is not preparing for the ministry. That is the degree of a lay person. Mr. McElroy should know that.”

  “RuthClaire balked him. That’s all he knows.”

  “So he blackens her name from his pulpit? For oh-so-many viewers? Is that what he does?” Adam stopped pacing, rubbed his lower jaw, and pointed a bony finger at the blank screen. “Dwight ‘Happy’ McElroy, you are a . . . very unpleasant . . . son of bitch.”

  I calmed Adam down and got him into the kitchen where, remembering the orders of Dr. Ruggiero, I prepared him a plate of soft scrambled eggs and a bowl of oatmeal. Adam ate ravenously, polishing off his eggs before turning his spoon to the still steaming, cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal.

  The West Bank was closed on Sundays, not so much to honor the sabbath as to acknowledge the mores of the townspeople who honored it. And, like God, I myself was not opposed to twenty-four hours of uninterrupted rest every seven days. At any rate, that afternoon Adam and I entertained ourselves preparing a makeshift gallery display of RuthClaire’s paintings Souls in her old studio. We organized them by dividing them into five groups of seven canvases each, scrupulously assigning different background colors and frame sizes to each group—after which we either hung them or propped them on shelves or tables where they would show off to best advantage.

  Warm afternoon sun came through the dusty Venetian blinds in zebra stripes of marmalade and shadow. Then, when I hoisted the blinds, the same light flooded the entire studio. Prismatic dazzle bounced around the room, and our placement of the canvases, along with the sunlight streaming in, transformed them from muddy, earthbound mistakes into oddly spectacular affirmations of their creator’s talent.

  “My God,” I said.

  Adam pointed at this canvas and then at that, daring me to note how the finishes that had once seemed flat and monolithic now had depth and intricacy. Under the mute pastels lay eloquent patterns of shape and line, iridescent commentaries on the otherwise commonplace surfaces in which they were embedded.

  “I never saw any of this before. It’s hard to believe.”

  “I know,” Adam said.

  “Is this the way you always see them?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But the other way, they’re inexcusably ugly . . . hardly worth keeping.”

  “Sometimes they might seem so. I have heard Miss RuthClaire admit the same.”

  “A desire to undo them? A desire to destroy them?”

  “Yes. But only when she has got . . . beyond them.”

  Above Paradise Farm, summer clouds pushed in from the west, mounting one another like amorous sheep. The light in the studio changed. Someone had swaddled the sun in gauze.

  “They’re ruined,” I said, meaning the paintings. “They’re back to normal.”

  Adam gave me a funny look. Then he patted my shoulder: Don’t fret, Mister Paul.

  A golden glory poured through the summer clouds. Only a little less dazzling than before, sunlight pirouetted through the studio. I looked again at RuthClaire’s paintings. No transcendence. The infinitesimal change in the light had somehow leached them of magic. And no matter how hard I tried over the next few days, I was never able to enter the studio at a time when the light slanted in at the necessary angle and chromatic intensity to bring the canvases back to life.

  On Monday morning, Adam and I each tried to disguise from the other our individual senses of expectancy. Today RuthClaire was supposed to receive from Craig a letter stipulating the groups—charities, political organizations—to which the Montarazes must write their ransom checks.

  At 10:01, I began to get ready to drive into town for my luncheon business. Niedrach should have called, I told myself. But I withdrew that thought, doubting the security of Beulah Fork’s telephone lines. Craig did not need to know where Adam had gone, only that he’d moved away from the big cupola’d house on Hurt Street. As for Adam, he was walking barefoot through my pecan grove, contemplating his and RuthClaire’s misfortune. I went down my sundeck steps to talk to him. “If anything happens here, keep me posted. Call me at the West Bank. Even if Livia George answers the phone, she won’t recognize your voice. She’s never heard it before.”

  Before Adam could reply, a vehicle crunched through the gravel on the circular drive fronting the house. Who? Friend, foe, or unsuspecting Avo
n lady?

  “Get inside,” I said. “I’ll check this out.”

  Adam obeyed. In the sweltering midmorning heat, I trotted around the house beneath the studio loft and turned the corner in time to see a male figure climbing down from the cab of a glossy violet pickup. The truck was jacked up so high on its oversized wheels that the man’s final step was a low-level parachute jump. He saw me the moment he landed and stood staring at me with a resolute skepticism. “You Mr. Loyd?”

  “Depends on who I’m talking to.”

  Neither clean-shaven nor bearded, neither a Beau Brummell nor a hobo, the man closed the distance between us. “A chameleon, huh? Well, so am I, I guess.” He halted about five feet away, his outfit that of a pulpwood worker: khaki pants, blue work shirt, rope-soled shoes, and a ball cap with a perforated crown.

  “I’m Special Agent Neil Hammond. Can we go inside?”

  These words lifted a weight. I shook Hammond’s hand and led him inside through the narrow front foyer. We found Adam sitting on the stairs with a shoeshine kit applying cordovan polish to the hand-tooled leather boots (with elevator heels) he’d worn to the West Bank in December. In his slacks and T-shirt, in his dedication to the simple task, Adam reminded me of an elderly black man who had shined shoes at the Ralston Hotel in Columbus in the early 1960s. Sitting halfway up the stairs, he nodded at Hammond and me without ceasing to rub polish into the toes and heels of his boots. There was an air of melancholy to his expertise, but a melancholy devoid of self-pity. Hammond and I watched him work. Adam finished applying the wax, tugged his left boot on, grasped a shoeshine brush with his bare right foot, and buffed the instep of the boot with an easy rocking motion that made a whispery noise in the stairwell. This sound was strangely soothing. Adam brought the left boot to a high cordovan shine, then removed it and duplicated the procedure in reverse, wearing the right boot and brushing it with his left foot. Hammond and I stood there beneath him in the stairwell, entranced.

  “Done,” Adam said. He positioned the polished pair of boots on the step so that the toes were even with its outer edge. They shone. They smelled good.

  Then Special Agent Hammond began to speak. He had just arrived from Atlanta with a photocopy of the letter addressed to the Montarazes by the kidnappers. On Saturday, the GBI had received federal authorization to fetch the letter from the U.S. Postal Service in advance of its scheduled Monday delivery. That was how he had managed to bring the message to Adam so early in the day. For the past month, Hammond explained, he’d been doing undercover investigation for the Bureau’s drug unit in Hothlepoya County. Yesterday morning, he’d been summoned back to Atlanta to assume the role of message runner for this particular case. He was living in a mobile home between Beulah Fork and Tocqueville, frequenting grubby roadhouses every evening to see if any dope deals were going down, and periodically staking out the Muscadine Gardens private airport to determine if any of the aircraft coming into it were pot planes. Although it might be wise if Adam and I kept our contacts with him to an absolute minimum, Niedrach wanted us to know that Hammond was our official liaison in Hothlepoya County.

  “The letter,” Adam croaked.

  Hammond went up the steps with the photocopy. I climbed to a spot behind Adam so I could read it over his shoulder. It was a tight fit for the three of us—but we arranged ourselves cozily enough, and Adam shook out the photocopy.

  “Fingerprints on the envelope have already conclusively identified the author as Craig Puddicombe,” Hammond said.

  The letter consisted of an introductory paragraph, a list of the ten organizations to receive donations from the Montarazes, and a final paragraph directing them to post the “genuine canceled chex” in a glass case at the interior entrance to Rich’s department store in Lenox Square Mall. The “genuine canceled chex” had to be posted by the second Monday in August, two weeks away, so that thousands upon thousands of mall patrons could view them as they entered Rich’s. The well-known signatures on these checks, and the surprising fringe organizations on their PAY TO THE ORDER OF lines, would surely stimulate a flood of copy-cat contributions. Also, nearly every young person who glanced at the canceled-check display would become a suspect in the kidnapping—assuming, of course, that either the FBI or the GBI set up continuous video surveillance of the store’s entrance.

  “Which we will,” Hammond said. “This isn’t as clever a ploy as Puddicombe thinks. It’ll be very easy to fake the canceled checks.”

  I tapped the photocopy. “He says he’ll ask the organizations in question if the contributions have really been made.”

  “A bluff, Mr. Loyd. Why have the canceled checks posted in a public place if they already know what posting the check is supposed to prove?”

  “For publicity’s sake,” I said. “To humiliate RuthClaire and Adam.”

  Adam looked up. “Would these organizations actually take our forced donations, Mr. Hammond?” His most fluid speech yet.

  “Some are outfits of dubious probity. They might. It seems to be this character’s idea that we’re to keep the kidnapping hidden from the general public—at least for now. That being the case, the outfits receiving the checks would have no reason to suppose you’d sent them under duress.”

  “Couldn’t they tell their directors in private?” I asked.

  “Of course. But that would entail a certain risk. If Puddicombe has an informant in just one of them, he’d figure out damned fast we’re using the same line of approach with all the other organizations. The danger to the kidnap victim is clear.”

  “Say nothing to any of them, then,” Adam directed. “We will send only genuine cashable checks.”

  “After Paulie’s recovered, Mr. Montaraz, there are steps we can take to recover the money, too. It’s possible a few of these outfits, understanding the full situation, would hand it over willingly—but it’s also likely that a couple of them, maybe more, wouldn’t mind profiting from your ill fortune. We’d go after them via the state attorney general’s office, but it could prove a messy set-to. Even a loud public outcry against one of these goofy bunches—Shock Troops of the Resurrected Confederacy—might not make them relent. It might even strengthen their will to take on our mainstream legal apparatus.”

  “About the money I have no care,” Adam said. “Let it go.”

  Looking over his shoulder, I studied the list. In addition to Congressman Aubrey O’Seamons, the Klairvoyant Empire of KuKlos Klandom, and the Shock Troops of the Resurrected Confederacy (STORC), Craig had specified an odd array of praiseworthy, semirespectable, and doubtful groups. The Methodist Children’s Home in Atlanta was cheek by jowl with the National Rifle Association and the Rugged White Survivalists of America. Neither Adam nor I could help noting that the last organization on the list was Dwight McElroy’s Greater Christian Constituency. Ever helpful, Craig had provided up-to-date mailing addresses for each and every one of these organizations.

  “You give twenty-three thousand to the Methodist Children’s Home,” I advised Adam. “Three thousand each to the other nine groups.”

  Adam said, “We lack so much money in our bank account, Mr. Hammond.”

  “If you’re sure you want to handle this by writing the checks,” he said, “we’ll deposit the amount needed to cover them—to fortify our case in seeking reimbursement from any really hard-nosed ransom recipient. Remember, though, that if you’d let us, our documents division could easily fake the canceled checks.”

  “Craig Puddicombe would find out,” Adam objected.

  “That’s a very real possibility.”

  “Then I must ask the aid of state in making up the total fifty thousand dollars.”

  “All right,” Hammond said.

  For a time, we sat in silence in the narrow chute of the stairwell, stymied by the harsh reality of the letter in Adam’s hands. Is every vice a corrupted virtue, every evil a perverted good? I don’t know, but the anguish and pain that Craig Puddicombe, a mere boy, was inflicting on the Montarazes—and on me
by my willing involvement in their predicament—stemmed entirely from his pursuit of a variety of justice that was not only blind but tone-deaf and unfeeling. Further, he had implicated Nancy Teavers in his militant passion for left-handed justice. How, I wondered, could one misguided person trigger such ever-widening chaos?

  “What now?” I asked Hammond.

  “Mr. Montaraz writes the checks, addresses the envelopes, and gives them to me to mail from a letter box in downtown Atlanta. And then you two fellas wait.”

  “Two weeks?” Adam asked. “Another two weeks?”

  When I reached the West Bank later that morning, Livia George came at me out of the kitchen with a section of Sunday’s paper rolled up like a rolling pin. She knocked me into a chair by the door with it.

  “You tole me they was fine! You tole me Adam was healin’ up real pretty ’n’ evverthin’ else was hunky-dory too!”

  “Hey, I thought it was.”

  “Their marriage done broke and you think that’s a up-tight development? Where you get your smarts, Mistah Paul? A Jay Cee Penney catalogue?” She laid the newspaper down, flattened it in front of me, and read aloud the story of Adam’s decision to forsake his family for an intense period of study at the Candler School of Theology. “I nevah figgered him a no-’count, Mistah Paul. Not for half a minute. Whyn’t you talk him out o’ this scheme while you was up there?”

  “He was bandaged from his operation. Neither let on they were having trouble.”

  “Poo!”

  “Livvy, they waited till I’d left town to divulge their story to the press. That was deliberate. They hoodwinked me—to spare me the agony of their agony.”

  “You go ’phone that crab-walkin’ Mistah Adam and tell him to get his fanny on back to his woman ’n’ chile!”

  “Nobody knows where he is, Livia George. He’s moved out.”

  For the rest of the day, my cook behaved like a woman infinitely sinned against, slamming pots and pans around and muttering. Once, she came out of the kitchen to glare at a red-haired man who’d returned his Continental Burger as oniony and overcooked.