The Throat

April?' Loud breathing blasted through the tape hiss as the caller seemed to wait for an answer. 'Goddamn it anyhow,' he said, and breathed for another ten seconds. The caller banged the receiver on the body of the telephone a few times before he succeeded in hanging up.

'Oh, God,' Ransom said. 'Just what I need. April's father. I told you about him—Alan Brookner? Can you believe this? He's supposed to be teaching his course on Eastern Religions next year, as well as the course on the Concept of the Sacred that we do together.' He put his hands on top of his head, as if he were trying to keep it from exploding upward like a gusher, and wandered back through the arch.

I put the book back on the coffee table.

Still holding down the top of his head, Ransom released an enormous sigh. 'I guess I'd better call him back. We might have to go over there.'

I said that was okay with me.

'In fact, maybe I'll let you call back these other people, too, after we're done with Alan.'

'Anything, fine,' I said.

'I'd better get back to Alan,' John said. He lowered his hands and returned to the telephone.

He dialed and then fidgeted impatiently during a long series of rings. Finally he said, 'Okay,' to me and turned to face the wall, tilting his head back. 'Alan, this is John. I just got your call… Yes, I can hear that… No, April isn't here, Alan, she had to go away. Look, do you want me to come over?… Sure, no problem, I'll be right there. Calm down, Alan, I'll be coming up the walk in a minute or two.'

He hung up and came back into the living room, looking so harassed that I wanted to order him to have a drink and go to bed. He had not even had breakfast, and now it was nearly two o'clock. 'I'm sorry about this, but let's get it over with,' he said.

'Aren't you going to drive?' I asked him when he went past the Pontiac and continued walking east on Ely Place.

'Alan only lives two blocks away, and even though we got lucky just now, you can never get a parking place around here. People are ready to kill each other for parking places.' He glanced back at me, and I sped up and joined him so that we were striding along together.

'A guy across from the hospital came out and yelled at me this morning for parking in front of his house,' I said. 'I guess I'm lucky he didn't shoot.'

Ransom grunted and jerked his thumb rightward as we got near the next corner. The collar of his white shirt was dark with moisture, and the front of his shirt stuck to his chest in amoeba-shaped damp patches.

'He was especially indignant because someone sat down on his lawn and then got up and headed for the hospital.'

Ransom gave me a startled look, like a deer spotting a hunter in the forest. 'Well.' He looked forward again and plunged along. 'I'm sorry to put you through all this aggravation.'

'I thought Alan Brookner was a hero of yours.'

'He's been having a certain amount of trouble.'

'He doesn't even know that April was injured?'

He nodded and stuffed his hands in his pockets. 'I'd appreciate it if you'd sort of go along with me on this one. I can't tell him that April is dead.'

'Isn't he going to read it in the newspapers?'

'Not likely,' John said. 'This is it.'

The first house on the east side of the block was a substantial three-story red brick Georgian building with a fanlight over the door and symmetrical windows in decorative embrasures. Tall oak trees grew on the lawn, and the grass was wild and long, overgrown with knee-high weeds. 'I keep forgetting to have something done about the grass,' John said, sounding as if he wanted to asphalt the lawn. Rolls of yellowing newspaper in rubber bands peeked out of the weeds, some of them so weathered they looked like the artificial logs in gas fireplaces.

'It won't be too clean in there,' he told me. 'We hired a maid for him last year, but she quit just before April went into the hospital, and I haven't been…' He shrugged.

'Doesn't he ever go outside?' I asked.

Ransom shook his head and pounded on the door again, then flattened his hands over his face. 'He's having one of his days. I should have known.' He brought a heavy bunch of keys out of his pocket and searched through them before finding the one he inserted into the lock. He opened the door. 'Alan? Alan, I'm here, and I brought a friend.'

He stepped inside and motioned for me to follow him.

I waded through the unopened envelopes that littered the blue elephant-foot Persian rug in the entry. Untidy heaps of books and magazines covered all but a narrow footpath going up the bottom steps of a curving staircase. John stooped to pick up a handful of letters and carried them into the next room. 'Alan?' He shook his head in frustration and tossed the letters onto a brown leather chesterfield.

Large oil paintings of families arranged before English country houses hung on the long wall opposite me. Rows of books filled the other three walls, and unjacketed books lay over the larger rose-colored Indian carpet that rolled across the room. Splayed books, torn pages of typing paper, and plates of congealed fried eggs, curling slices of bread, and charred hot dogs covered the broad mantel and a wide leather-topped table in front of the chesterfield. All the lights burned. Something in the room made my eyes sting as if I'd been swimming in an overchlorinated pool.

'What a mess,' John said. 'Everything would be fine if the maid hadn't quit—look, he's been ripping up a manuscript.'

Big fluffy balls of gray dust fluttered away from his shoes. He pushed open a window set into the bookshelves on the side of the room.

I caught a faint but definite smell of excrement.

A big wheezy old man's baritone boomed out, 'John? Is that you, John?'

Ransom turned wearily to me and raised his voice. 'I'm downstairs!'

'Downstairs?' The old man sounded like he had a built-in megaphone. 'Did I call you?'

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.'