Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

“Unless you believe you’re immortal! And if you take one, don’t let it pop!”

“Why the hell not?” shouted the same young man, who had cleared a path to the end of the runway.

Pam replied, “Because if you let it pop, you’ll die.”

“Oh, come off it.”

“This is your soul. If you let it pop, you’ll die within three days.”

“Bullshit!”

David Blau came to the end of the runway, lifted his cluster of balloons, and told the entire bistro, “It isn’t bullshit. Whoever accepts one of these, but fails to care for it and lets it pop, well, you’ll blow away on the wind as if you never existed.”

The theatricality of this speech did not deprive it of effect—just the opposite. It clearly frightened some of those who had come forward for balloons. David had uttered a formula, and that formula produced the desired result: an explosion of superstitious doubt in people who ordinarily took pride in their hardnosed pragmatism. Even I found myself believing David’s weird formula. Some folks backed away, others shoved forward to replace the faint-hearted. T. P. had no doubt. He wanted a balloon.

“Hunh,” he said, almost toppling from RuthClaire’s arms. “Hunh, hunh, hunh!”

“Go get him one,” Caroline Hanna urged me.

Pam Sorrells had just about given out all her balloons, while the black man who had shot out the bobbing souls of the cardboard hominids was distributing his dwindling supply on the runway’s opposite side.

“That’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “Bilker’ll get him a balloon.”

“No, ma’am. I got other work.”

“I’ll do it, then,” Caroline said.

“You’ll get an elbow in the lip,” I warned her.

Almost miraculously, a punkette with a cottony white scalp lock and no eyebrows appeared at our table. A frail creature in a vest lacing across her midriff, she extended her arms to T. P., who went to her as if she were an old and trusted friend. RuthClaire gave the kid to the newcomer as much to relieve the pressure on her arms as to humor T. P. “I’ll get him a b’loon,” the girl growled, screwing up one eye to look at my godson at such close range. “Friend a mine round there’s got one awready. He don’ want it. I’ll give it to your nipper. Be rat back.” She sounded as if she had a mouthful of cornmeal. Half stupefied by surprise, half grateful to her for calming the baby, we watched as she backed away to fetch the “b’loon” from her friend. She scarcely seemed to move her feet.

Then Bilker awoke: “Hey, wait a minute!”

“I think it’s okay,” RuthClaire said. “She seemed familiar. She’ll get Paulie a balloon and bring him back in a better temper.”

“I’d better go after her,” Bilker said.

Something in me was belatedly alerted to the situation’s queerness. “Look, Bilker, you stay with RuthClaire and Caroline. I’ll go after her.”

“What’s the matter?” Caroline grabbed my arm. Patrons near the end of the runway engulfed the white-haired girl, and the balloons floating above the crowd were no more useful as markers than clouds.

“I think I know her,” I said, shaking free. “That’s what’s wrong.” I plunged past Bilker, rebounded off a Tech student heading for the stage, squirmed through a gap, and, my heart pounding mightily, sidled around the end of the runway. Spotlights continued to rake the club’s interior, and behind me RuthClaire cried in anguish, “ Paulie !”

Beyond the runway, I broke into an open area, but T. P. and his abductress had already vanished. They might have taken any of four or five different routes, but I headed for the nearest exit, a heavy door to the far left of the stage. I slammed its push bar, opening it on the intimidating whirr and rumble of the expressway. An automobile was heading down the hill past the front of the club, but it was hard to believe the punkette had trotted through the alley and climbed into that vehicle so quickly. I ducked back inside Sinusoid Disturbances, and the door wheezed shut on its pneumatic retards.

Bilker was at my side. “She got away?”

My helpless look said all he needed to know.

“Shit!” he said. “It’s a kidnapping, a goddamn kidnapping.”

“Maybe not. This place is crazy. She could turn up again in a couple of minutes.”

“Yeah,” said Bilker. “And the Rooskies could unilaterally disarm tomorrow.” His hand inside his coat, he scanned the crowd for one face in a shifting mosaic of faces. “Friggin’ donkey brain.”

“If I’m a donkey brain, you’re its butt. You let RuthClaire hand the kid over.”

Bilker looked at me with malevolent contempt. “Who said I was talkin’ about you?” Someone had kidnapped Tiny Paul, and we were at loggerheads over a matter of no consequence. Even Bilker understood that. He grabbed my arm and dragged me back to the table where RuthClaire and Caroline were waiting. T. P. might be lost (for the time being, if not for good), but he had no intention of compounding his failure by letting someone else abduct RuthClaire.

“What happened? What’s going on?” The women spoke almost in unison. Bilker mumbled something about our having lost the girl’s trail, and RuthClaire, glancing back and forth between her bodyguard and me, clutched my lapels.

“You know who it was, don’t you?”

“Maybe I’m wrong,” I said, “but I think it was Nancy, with her eyebrows plucked and her head partly shaved. You know, little Nancy Teavers, Elvis’s wife.”

Bilker spent the next thirty minutes charging through the crowd at Sinusoid Disturbances, buttonholing people to ask if they’d seen a skinny female carrying a kid in white shorts. He barged into the restrooms—the women’s as well as the men’s—to identify the startled occupants of the toilet stalls. His efforts were unavailing, but he kept trying, as if single-minded persistence would make T. P. reappear.

I telephoned the police, who sent a squad car and notified the offices of several other area law-enforcement units. The cops who came interviewed RuthClaire, Caroline, and me while Bilker continued to play detective on his own. The older of the two policemen did all the questioning. His nametag said Crawford. He was a stocky man with a forehead furrowed by years of occupational squinting and skepticism. So he could hear our answers, he questioned us on the sidewalk out front. His partner, meanwhile, descended into the pandemonium of Sinusoid Disturbances to look under the rocks that Bilker had not already turned over.

Aboveground, Crawford pursued his interrogation: “She was a waitress in your restaurant in Beulah Fork?”

“Once upon a time.”

“Why would she kidnap the Montaraz child, Mr. Loyd?”

I told Sergeant Crawford about the Ku Klux Klan involvement of Nancy’s late husband, E. L. Teavers. I told him how Adam had wrestled E. L. into the vat of an abandoned brick kiln in Hothlepoya County. That was all it took. Crawford recalled the story. Every city cop and backwoods deputy in Georgia knew it. He took a note.

“Revenge? You think her motive’s revenge?”

“I don’t think she planned this herself,” I said. “At the West Bank, she was a sweet, hardworking kid. She liked me. She liked RuthClaire. Somone’s gotten to her.”

“Who?”

“Craig Puddicombe, to put a name on him.”

“Oh, God.” RuthClaire slumped into me. “I handed Paulie over to her. I put him into her arms.” She began to cry.

“On some level,” I said, “you recognized Nancy. She took T. P. from you, you didn’t foist him on her.”

“I might as well have wrapped him up in a box and mailed him to her doorstep.”

“Look, you’d been entertaining T. P. all evening. The subliminal-recognition factor made you trust the girl in spite of her getup. You befriended her after E. L.’s death, you certainly didn’t expect her to betray that friendship.”