Michael Bishop - Ancient of Days

Anyway, this naked Little Person hung four feet off the gallery floor on a piece of nylon cord. The cord was tied to a movable metal track just below the ceiling. As naked as his female companion, Tiny Paul hung to her left on another cord. Both pathetic little figures were lifeless, the doll from the moment of its manufacture, Tiny Paul deprived of breath at an instant I could not estimate. Limp blue balloons clung to the mouths of both figures. Craig had stuck them to their lips with mucilage. Excess mucilage glittered on their faces like dried semen. Other limp blue balloons lay strewn about the floor as if the Great Inflator had lost either his faith or his mind. By contrast, Paulie’s minute penis poked out like the valve on a bicycle tire, mocking the flaccid bladders on the floor. I sagged against a wall and knocked four or five Newsweek covers to the floor. Dozens of repetitions of Adam and RuthClaire, above the legend THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHY / An Art in Militant Transition , were plastered to the chamber’s walls.

That’s what Craig had been doing when Adam looked in, pasting up magazine covers, applying them with a hand-held brush and a solution of wallpaper paste. A Tupperware container full of the oatmealish goo was propped at an angle against the base of the door. Craig had brought everything upstairs with him in his cardboard box: murder victim, doll, magazine covers, cord, brush, wallpaper paste. A performance-art activity of fatal comprehensiveness, the ultimate existential Dadaism. I slumped to the floor, dragging more covers down with me. Fie on art. Fie on THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHY. Fie on Craig Puddicombe.

Looking at my godson’s rotating shadow on the floor, and then at my own upward-jutting toes, I began to weep. This little piggie went to market, this little piggie stayed home. I studied my toes through a distorting film of tears. They were fascinating, my toes, each indisputably unique: Abigail Faye, Dorothy Lilac, Hepzibah Rose, Karma Leigh, and Cherry Helena. The other five had names, too. They were all detachable. You could unplug them from my feet and adopt them out to deserving amputees. Some of the sorry farts would treat them badly, of course, and maim them in unconscionable ways that made you ashamed to belong to a species possessing toes. Detachable little piggies suspended from gallows, so many innocent little lynching victims….

Bilker had his hand on my shoulder. “You didn’t cut the poor little fella down, Mr. Loyd?” His voice was gentle.

“I was going to.”

“I’ll do it.”

A scruple surged into my murky brain. “Should you touch him? This is a crime scene, Bilker. Shouldn’t everything stay as it is?”

“The poor kid’s been away from home long enough as it is.”

I began to get to my piggies, my bare, dirty feet.

Bilker doubled a loop in the nylon cord above Tiny Paul’s head, inserted the blade of his pocketknife, and sawed at the cord vigorously. “Do I give a shit,” he said, “about the holiness of crime scenes? I’ve just blown Puddicombe’s fuckin’ face away. Which the Effin’ Bee Aye ain’t likely to be crazy about, neither.” He sawed and sawed. “And I’ll be damned if even that worries me.” The cord finally broke, and Bilker caught T. P. in his arms. “You want to hold him?”

Did I want to hold him? I must have appeared to, for Bilker brought the child to me and put him in my arms. He was cold and rigid, like a plastic doll. The small pudgy half-breed who had charmed Caroline in Everybody’s. The same but not the same. A shell. A gallery room without statues or paintings. Where had all the life gone?

And where was Adam? I asked Bilker.

“Puttin’ on his clothes. I tied a hankie ’round his goddamn elbow. It’s not too bad. C’mon, let’s not make him shinny up here after us again. He might pass out.”

I pulled the balloon off T. P.’s lip and dropped it into the container of wallpaper paste by the door. We left the galleries by the stairs that Bilker had earlier climbed and found Adam in the parking lot, fully dressed except for his shoes. He was holding his shoes with his fingers hooked inside their heels so they hung down beside his knee. As he stood in the middle of the parking lot, rain slowly filled the oily puddles around his bare feet. Puddicombe’s truck sat behind him with its driver’s-side door open and the driver slumped forward, his head between the open door and the steering wheel. The ladder once propped against the wall from the loadbed lay on the asphalt, on an impotent diagonal.

Apparently, Craig had pulled the ladder clear of the rampway roof, driven out of the lot, and then reversed directions in an attempt to back over his habiline pursuer. Adam had leapt into the truck, Craig had made the GM fishtail to shake him out, and Bilker had lumbered out of Abraxas in time to fire his Ruger .357 magnum through the pickup’s open window into Craig’s head. Puddicombe had been so focused on bucking Adam out of the truck that he had not even seen Bilker. As a result, his determination to leave tire tracks on Adam had proved fatal… for him.

I was not sorry. I was relieved.

Bilker and I stepped through the fallen ladder’s rungs and joined Adam in the middle of the lot. I held Paulie out to him. Adam set his shoes down, in a puddle that half-submerged them, and took the child, holding T. P. with his hands under his back so he could nuzzle his son’s bloated belly and mumble comfort into his death-stopped ears.

Bilker approached the truck and tumbled the killer from the driver’s seat. With a sucking thud, his corpse sprawled onto the ebony pavement, most of its face gone. He was unrecognizable as anything but an adult male in stained painter’s coveralls. Where had the malevolent energy of his life just fled? Bilker kicked the corpse three or four times, each kick more vicious than the last.

“Don’t,” Adam said. “For him, it is over.”

Bitterly, Bilker said, “It ain’t over for you and Mrs. Montaraz, or for me. We’ll be livin’ with the fuckin’ fallout from this for the rest of our lives.”

Still holding his dead son, Adam walked over to Bilker and looked him full in the face. “I don’t think so. We will not forget, but later our shroud of grief will unravel, and we will be as good as new again.” Bilker and I gaped at Adam. Bilker turned and spat into a puddle, but we both understood there was something willful about Adam’s saintly serenity. It was too soon for forgiveness and reconciliation, too soon to offer up T. P.’s innocent body as a sacrifice to human understanding. Bilker and I were appalled. We had angers and hatreds to be worked out, sorrows and sufferings from which to distill a thin, bittersweet balm. Magnanimity, right now, was an emotional non sequitur.

“I’ll get the car,” I said. But Bilker and Adam walked with me, and we drove back to Hurt Street without saying another word.

Fingerprints identified the man shot by Bilker as Craig Raymond Puddicombe. In the dead man’s wallet were two driver’s licenses, both of them false. One identified him as Teavers, Elvis Lamar. He’d taken great care to use this alias and the Montaraz address near Inman Park when he did not wish to be traced to his rental property, a frame house on the southeastern arc of I-285. The other driver’s license gave his name as Burdette, Gregory R. It pinpointed the location of his house off the perimeter expressway. As Greg Burdette, Craig had lived in Atlanta for nearly eight months, working in a collateral branch of the profession practiced by Adam and RuthClaire. Like them, he was a painter. Unlike them, he did houses, garages, and signboards. He worked fairly regularly, but had to scratch for jobs to stay ahead of his debts.

For two reasons, the FBI let Special Agent Niedrach and his GBI colleagues conclude the kidnapping investigation. First, Niedrach and Davison had handled the Klan episode in Beulah Fork at the end of last summer; and, second, Craig Puddicombe and his accomplice-victim had never taken Tiny Paul out of the Greater Atlanta area.