The Throat (30 page)

Ransom's face sagged. "Yes.
You called me."

"You bring April with you?
We're supposed to go on a
trip
."

Footsteps came down the
staircase.

"I don't know if I'm ready
for this," Ransom said.

"Who are you talking to?
Grant? Is Grant Hoffman here?"

The footsteps reached the
bottom of the stairs. John said, "No, it's a friend of mine, not Grant
Hoffman."

An old man with streaming
white hair and long, skinny arms and legs padded into the room wearing
only a pair of underpants stained with successive layers of yellow. His
knees and elbows looked too large for the rest of him, as big as boles
on trees. White hair foamed from his skinny chest, and loose, gossamer
hairs drifted around his neck and the underside of his chin. If he had
not been hunched over, he would have been my height. A ripe, sour odor
came in with him. His eyes were simian and very bright.

"Where's Grant?" he
bellowed. "I heard you talking to him." The incandescent eyes focused
on me, and his face closed like a clamshell. "Who's this? Did he come
for April?"

"No, Alan, this is my
friend, Tim Underhill. April is out of town."

"That's ridiculous." The
angry chimpanzee face swung back to scowl at Ransom. "April would
tell
me if she went out of town. Did you tell me that she went out of
town?"

"Several times."

The old man walked up to us
on his knotted stork's legs. His hair floated around his head. "Well, I
don't remember everything, I suppose. Friend of John's, are ye? You
know my daughter?"

The odor increased as he got
closer, and the stinging in my eyes got worse.

"I don't, no," I said.

"Too bad. She'd knock your
bobby sox off. You want a drink? A drink's what you need, if you're
gonna tangle with April."

"He doesn't drink," John
said. "And you shouldn't have any more."

"Come on in the kitchen with
me, everything you need's in there."

"Alan, I have to get you
upstairs," John said. "You need to get cleaned up." .

"I had a shower this
morning." He jerked his head toward a door on the right-hand side of
the room, grinning at me to let me know that we could cut loose in the
kitchen if we got rid of this turkey. Then his face closed up again,
and he gave John an unfriendly look. "You can come in the kitchen too,
if you tell me where April is. If you know. Which I doubt."

He crunched my elbow in his
bony claw and pulled at my arm.

"Okay, let's see what the
kitchen is like," John said.

"I don't drink to excess,"
said Alan Brookner. "I drink exactly the amount I want to drink. That's
different. Drunks drink to excess."

He tugged me across the
room. Brown streaks and spatters had dried onto his legs.

"Ever meet my daughter?"

"No."

"She's a pistol. Man like
you would appreciate her." He banged his forearm against the door in
the wall of books, and it flew open as if on springs.

We were moving down a
hallway lined with framed diplomas and awards and certificates. Among
the awards were a few family photographs, and I saw a younger, robust
Alan Brookner with his tweedy arm around a beaming blond girl only a
few inches shorter than himself. They looked like they owned the
world—confidence surrounded them like a shield.

Brookner went past the
photograph without looking at it, as he must have done a dozen times
every day. His smell was much more intense in the hallway. White fur
like packed spiderwebs covered his bony shoulders. "Get a good woman
and pray she'll outlive you. That's the ticket."

He thrust his way through
another door and pulled me into a cluttered junk pile of a kitchen
before the door swung shut. The smell of rotting food helped mask
Brookner's stench. The door swung back by itself and struck John
Ransom, who said, "Damn!"

"You ever think about
damnation, John? Fascinating concept, full of ambiguity. In heaven we
lose our characters in the perpetual glorification of God, but in hell
we continue to be ourselves. What's more, we think we deserve
damnation, and Christianity tells us our first ancestors cursed us with
it, Augustine said that even Nature was damned, and—" He dropped my arm
and spun around. "Now where the hell is that bottle? Those bottles, I
should say."

Empty Dewar's bottles stood
against the splashboard of the sink counter, and a paper bag full of
empty bottles stood beside the back door. Pizza delivery boxes lay
strewn over the counters and tipped into the sink, where familiar brown
insects roamed over and through them, scuttling across the crusty
plates and upended glasses.

"Ask and ye shall receive,"
Brookner said, fetching an unopened bottle of Scotch from a case
beneath the sink. He slammed it down on the counter, and the roaches in
the sink slipped inside the nearest pizza boxes. He broke the seal and
twisted the cap off. "Glasses up there," he said to me, nodding at a
cupboard near my head.

I opened the cupboard. Five
highball glasses stood widely scattered on a shelf that could have held
thirty. I brought down three and set them in front of Brookner. He
looked a little like a disreputable Indian holy man.

"Oh well, today I could use
a drink," Ransom said. "Let's have one, and then we'll get you taken
care of."

"Tell me where April is."
Brookner gripped the bottle and glared at him out of his monkey face.

"April is out of town," John
said.

"Investment poo-bahs don't
go dillydallying when their customers need them. Is she at home? Is she
sick?"

"She's in San Francisco,"
John said. He reached and took the bottle from his father-in-law the
way a cop would take a handgun from a confused teenager.

"And what in Tophet is my
daughter doing in San Francisco?"

Ransom poured half an inch
of whiskey into a glass and gave it to the old man. "Barnett is going
to merge with another investment house, and there's been talk about
April getting a promotion and running a separate office out there."

"What's the other investment
house?" Brookner drank all of the whiskey in two gulps. He held out his
glass without looking at it. Liquid shone on his jutting lower lip.

"Bear, Stearns," John said.
He poured a good slug of whiskey into his own glass and slowly took a
mouthful.

"She won't go. My daughter
won't leave me." He was still holding out his glass, and John poured
another inch of whiskey into it. "We were—we were supposed to go
somewhere together." He gestured at me with the bottle.

I shook my head.

"Go on, he wants one too,
can't you see?"

Ransom twisted sideways,
poured whiskey into the third glass, and handed it to me.

"Here's looking at you,
kid," Brookner said, and raised his glass to his mouth. He drank half
of his whiskey and checked to see if I was still interested in having a
good time.

I raised my glass and
swallowed a tiny bit of the Scotch. It tasted hot, like something
living. I moved away from the old man and set my glass on a long pine
table. Then I noticed what else was on the table.
"Ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay," Brookner boomed out in his disconcertingly
healthy voice. "All the whores are in luck today." He sucked at his
drink.

Next to my glass was a
revolver and stack of twenty-dollar bills that must have added up to at
least four or five hundred dollars. Beside that was a stack of tens,
just as high. A taller pile of fives stood beside that, and about a
hundred singles lay in a heap like a pile of leaves at the end of the
table. I made some sort of noise, and the old man turned around and saw
what I was looking at.

"My bank," he said. "Worked
it out myself. So I can pay the delivery boys. This way they can't
cheat ya, get it? Make change lickety-split. The gun there is my
security system. I grab it and watch them count it out."

"Delivery boys?" John asked.

"From the pizza place, the
one with the radio vans. And the liquor store. Generally I asks 'em if
they'd like a little blast. Mostly they just take the money and run."

"I bet they do," John said.

"Uh-oh, my stomach feels
bad." The old man palped his stringy belly with his right hand. "All of
a sudden." He groaned.

"Get upstairs," John said.
"You don't want to have an accident in here. I'll come with you. You're
going to have a shower."

"I already had—"

"Then you'll have another
one." Ransom turned him around and pushed him through the swinging door.

Brookner bellowed about his
stomach as they went up a second staircase at the back of the house.
The loud voice went from room to room. I poured whiskey over the
roaches, and they scampered back into the pizza boxes. When I got tired
of watching them, I sat down next to the piles of money and waited.
After a little while, I began stacking the pizza boxes and flattening
them out so that I could squeeze them into the garbage can. Then I
squirted soap over the heap of dishes in the sink and turned on the hot
water.

About forty minutes later
Ransom came back into the kitchen and stopped short when he saw what I
was doing. His wide, pale face clouded over, but after a moment of
hesitation, he pulled a white dish towel from a drawer and began wiping
dishes. "Thanks, Tim," he said. "The place was a mess, wasn't it? What
did you do with all the stuff that was lying around?"

"I found a couple of garbage
bags," I said. "There weren't all that many dishes, so I decided to
take care of them while you hosed the old man down. Did he get sick?"

"He just complained a lot. I
pushed him into the shower and made sure he used soap. He goes into
these funny states, he doesn't remember how to do the simplest things.
Other times, like when he was down here, he seems almost in control—not
really rational, of course, but kind of on top of things."

I wondered what the other
times were like if I had seen Alan Brookner when he was on top of
things.

We finished washing and
drying the dishes.

"Where is he now?"

"Back in bed. As soon as he
was dry, he passed out. Which is exactly what I want to do. Would you
mind us getting out of here?"

I pulled the plug in the
sink and wiped my hands on the wet towel. "Did you ever figure out what
that trip was that he kept talking about?"

He opened the kitchen door
and fiddled with the knob so that the door would lock behind us when he
closed it. "Trip? April used to take him to the zoo, the museum, places
like that. Alan isn't really up for any excursion, as you probably
noticed."

"And this was one of his
good days?"

We went outside by the
kitchen door and walked around the side of the house. The overgrown
grass baked in the sunlight. One of the big oak trees had been split by
lightning, and an entire side had turned black and leafless.
Everything, house, lawn, and trees, needed care.

"Well, everything he said
was coherent, as far as I remember. He would have been better if he
hadn't been drinking for a couple of days."

We came out of the tall
grass onto the sidewalk and began walking back to Ely Place. Prickly
little brown balls clung to my trousers like Velcro. I pulled fresh
moist air into my lungs.

"He's supposed to teach next
year?"

"He made it through last
year with only a couple of funny episodes."

I asked how old he was.

"Seventy-six."

"Why hasn't he retired?"

John laughed—an unhappy
bark. "He's Alan Brookner. He can stay on as long as he wants. But if
he goes, the whole department goes with him."

"Why is that?"

"I'm the rest of the
department."

"Are you looking for a new
job?"

"Anything could happen. Alan
might snap out of it."

We walked along in silence
for a time.

"I suppose I ought to get
him a new cleaning woman," he said finally.

"I think you ought to start
checking out nursing homes," I told him.

"On my salary?"

"Doesn't he have money of
his own?"

"Oh yes," he said. "I
suppose there's some of that."

When we got back to his
house, Ransom asked me if I wanted something from the kitchen. We went
through a dining room dominated by a baronial table and into a modern
kitchen with a refrigerator the size of a double bed and deep counters
lined with two food processors, a pasta machine, a blender, and a bread
maker. Ransom opened a cabinet and brought down two glasses from a
crowded shelf. He shoved them one after the other into the ice-making
contraption on the front of the refrigerator and filled them with
silvery crescents of ice. "Some kind of water? Soft drink?"

"Anything," I said.

He swung open the
refrigerator, took out a bottle of water with a picture of an iceberg
on the label, broke the seal, and filled my glass. He handed me the
glass, returned the bottle, and pulled bags of sliced meat and wrapped
cheeses and a loaf of bread from the shelves. Mayonnaise, mustard in a
stone crock, margarine, a head of romaine lettuce. He lined all of this
up on the butcher block counter between us, and then set two plates and
knives and forks beside them. Then he closed the refrigerator and
opened the freezer door on shelves of frozen cuts of meat, a stack of
frozen dinners, a big frozen pizza wedged in like a truck tire, and two
shelves filled with bottles of vodka resting on their sides—Absolut
Peppar and Citron; Finlandia; Japanese vodka; Polish vodka; Stolichnaya
Cristal; pale green vodkas and pale brown vodkas and vodkas with things
floating inside the bottles, long strands of grass, cherries, chunks of
lemon, grapes. I leaned forward to get a better look.

He yanked out the Cristal,
unscrewed the cap, and poured his glass half full. "Really ought to
chill the glass," he mumbled, "but it's not every day that your wife
dies, and then you have to shove a seventy-six-year-old man into the
shower and make sure he cleans off the shit smeared all over his legs."
He gulped down vodka and made a face. "I practically had to climb in
with him." Another gulp, another grimace, another gulp. "I did have to
dry him off. That white hair all over his body—ugh. Sandpaper."