The Throat (73 page)

"In this?" He
was carrying his plate to the table, and he flapped a hand at the
window. "Let's give it another half hour or so, and see what happens."
He gave me a curious half-smile. "What made you change your mind?"

I spread a
spoonful of jam on top of my toast. "I was thinking about what you said
last night—that there had to be something in that house. Do you
remember that little piece of paper I found in the Green Woman?"

He stopped
shaking his head after I spoke a couple of sentences and began getting
interested after I reminded him of Walter Dragonette's notebook.

"Okay," he
said. "So
if
this guy kept
detailed notes about every murder he
committed, then we can really nail him. All we have to do is trace him
back to the town where he was working."

"Tom Pasmore
would probably be able to help us with that."

"I'm not
putting any faith in that guy," he said. "This is our baby."

"We'll think
about that after we get the notes," I said. For the rest of the
morning, we listened to weather reports on the radio and kept checking
the windows. The fog was as thick at ten as it had been at eight, and
the radio advised everybody to stay home. There had been half a dozen
accidents on the freeways, as well as another five or six minor crashes
at intersections. No planes had left Millhaven airport since before
midnight, and all incoming flights were being diverted to Milwaukee or
Chicago.

John kept
jumping up from the couch to take a few steps outside the front door,
coming back in to razz me about getting lost.

I was glad he
was in a good mood. While he ran in and out, checking to see if we
could see far enough to drive, I leafed through "The Paraphrase of
Shem" and "The Second Treatise of Great Seth."

"Why are you
bothering with that drivel?" John asked.

"I'm hoping
to find out," I said. "What do you have against it?"

"Gnosticism
is a dead end. When people allude to it now, they make it mean anything
they want it to mean by turning it into a system of analogies. And the
whole point of gnosticism in the first place was that any kind of
nonsense you could make up was true because you made it up."

"I guess
that's why I like it," I said.

He shook his
head in cheerful derision. At twelve-thirty we ate lunch. The planes
were still sitting on the runways and the announcers hadn't stopped
telling people to stay home, but from the kitchen window, we could see
nearly halfway to the hemlocks at the back of John's property. "You
won't lose your mind again if I bring that pistol, will you?" John
asked me.

"Just don't
shoot the old lady next door," I said.

I turned on
the fog lights and pulled out into the street. The stop sign at the end
of the block swam up out of the fog in time for me to brake to a halt.

"You can do
this, right?" John asked.

Experimentally,
I flicked on the headlights, and both the stop sign and the street
ahead disappeared into a shimmering gray fog pierced by two useless
yellow tunnels. Ransom grunted, and I punched the lights to low beam.
At least other people would be able to see us coming.

"Let's hire a
leper to walk in front of us, ringing a bell," Ransom said.

On a normal
day, the drive to South Seventh Street took about twenty minutes; John
and I got there in a little more than two and a half hours. We made it
without accident, though we had two close calls and one miraculous
intervention, when a boy on a bicycle suddenly loomed up directly in
front of me, no more than two or three feet away. I veered around him
and kept driving, my mouth dry and my bowels full of water.

We got out of
the car a block away from the house. The fog obscured even the
buildings across the sidewalk. "It's this way," I said, and led him
across the street and down toward Bob Bandolier's old house.

I heard low
voices. Hannah and Frank Belknap were sitting on their porch, looking
out at nothing. From the sidewalk, I could just make out the porch of
the Bandolier place. The Belknaps' voices came through the fog as
clearly as voices on a radio that had been dialed low. They were
talking about going to northern Wisconsin later in the summer, and
Hannah was complaining about having to spend all day in a boat.

"You always
catch more fish than I do, you know you do," Frank said.

"That doesn't
mean it's all I want to do," said Hannah's disembodied voice.

John and I
began walking slowly and softly across the lawn, making as little noise
as possible.

The side of
the house cut off Frank's reply. John and I walked over wet brown
grass, keeping close to the building. At the corner we turned into the
backyard. At the far end, barely visible in the fog, a low wooden fence
with a gate stood along a narrow alley. We came up to the back door,
set on a concrete slab a little larger than a welcome mat.

John bent
down to look at the lock, whispered, "No problem," and hauled the big
ball of keys out of his pants pocket. He riffled through them, singled
out one, and tried it in the lock. It went a little way in and stopped.
He pulled it out, flicked through the keys again, and tried another one
that looked identical to the first. That didn't work, either. He turned
to me, shrugged and smiled, and singled out another. This one slid into
the lock as if it had been made for it. The lock mechanism clicked, and
the door opened. John made an after you, Alfonse gesture, and I slid
inside behind his back while he turned to close the door behind us.

I knew where
everything was. It was the kitchen of the house where I had grown up, a
little dusty and battered, but entirely familiar. A rectangular table
with a scarred top stood a few feet from the door. In the dim light, I
could make out the names
BETHY JANEY BILLY
scratched
into the wood, along with a lot of random squiggles. Ransom took a
couple of steps forward on the cracked yellow linoleum. "What are you
waiting for?" he said.

"Decompression,"
I said. A section of wallpaper with images of shepherds and
shepherdesses holding crooks drooped away from the wall. Someone,
probably Bethy, Janey, and Billy, had scribbled over the images, and
ancient yellow grease spots spattered the wall behind the little
electric stove. An enormous cock and balls, imperfectly covered with a
palimpsest of scrawled lines, sprouted from one of the shepherds near
the loose seam of wallpaper. The Dumkys had left plenty of signs of
their brief residence.

John said,
"You should be used to a life of crime by now," and walked through the
kitchen into the hallway. "What are there, three or four rooms?"

"Three, not
counting the kitchen," I said. I came into thedark little hallway and
put my hand on a doorknob. "The boy's bedroom would have been here," I
said, and opened the door.

The narrow
rectangle of Fee's old bedroom matched mine exactly. There was a narrow
bed with a dark green army surplus blanket and a single wooden chair. A
small chest of drawers, stained so dark it was almost black, stood
against the wall. At the far end, a narrow window exposed a moving
layer of fog. I stepped inside, and my heart shrank. John knelt to look
under the bed. "Cooties." A frieze of stick figures, round suns with
rays, and cartoon houses all interconnected by a road map of scribbled
lines, covered the walls to the level of my waist. The light blue paint
above the graffiti had turned dingy and mottled.

"This Fee kid
got away with a lot of crap," John said.

"The tenants
did this," I said. I went to the bed and pulled down the blanket. There
were no sheets, just an ancient buttoned mattress covered in dirty
stripes.

John gave me
a curious look and began opening the drawers. "Nothing," he said.
"Where would he stash the boxes?"

I shook my
head and escaped the bedroom. The three windows at the front of the
living room were identical to those in my old house, and the whole long
rectangular room brought me back to childhood as surely as the bedroom.
An air of leftover misery and rage seemed to intensify the musty air. I
knew this room—I had
written
it.

I had placed
two tables in front of the windows—the place where our davenport had
stood—and there they were, more ornate than I had imagined, but the
same height, and of the same dark wood. A telephone sat on the table to
the left, beside a worn overstuffed chair—Bob Bandolier's throne. The
long couch I had described stood against the far wall, green, not
yellow, but with the same curved arms I had described.

And yet, I
thought, it was more unlike than like the room I had imagined. I had
thought that Bob Bandolier would provide his family with devotional
pictures, the Sermon on the Mount or the Feeding of the Multitude, but
there were no reproductions or chromographs on the walls, only
wallpaper. I had imagined a small shelf of books with the Bible and
paperback Westerns and mysteries, but the only shelves in the living
room were shallow, glass, and rimmed with black metal piping—once they
had held china figurines. A high-backed brocade chair with rolled arms
stood beside the telephone table, and another matching chair without
arms faced into the room from beside the other, empty table. His and
hers.

"It's like
a—like a museum of 1945," John said, turning to me with an incredulous
smile.

"That's what
it is," I said.

I sat down on
the chaise and looked sideways. Through a window in the unadorned wall,
I could just about make out the side of the Belknap house. Through a
matching window in her own living room, Hannah had seen the adult Fee
sitting just where I was now. John was looking behind the chairs and
beneath the couch. Fee came at night and used only a flashlight, so he
had never noticed the grease spots on the brocade chairs or the rim of
grime along the edges of the couch cushions.

John opened
the door opposite that into the common entry. I stood up and followed
him into the bedroom where Anna Bandolier had died of starvation and
neglect.

A rusty black
stain wavered down the middle of the bare mattress on the double bed.
John looked under the bed, and I opened Bob Bandolier's walnut clothing
press. Two wire hangers hung from a metal rail, and a third lay deep in
forty-year-old dust on the bottom of the press. "The drawers," John
said, and we both opened one of the big drawers on either side of the
little mirrored vanity table against the wall. Mine was empty. John
pushed.his drawer closed and looked at me with both impatience and
exasperation.

"Okay," he
said. "Where are they?"

"After Bob
Bandolier got rid of the Sunchanas, there were no more upstairs
tenants. So he might have put the boxes there." Then I remembered
something else. "And there's a basement, where they used to do the
washing."

"I'll look
upstairs." He brushed the dust off his knees and gave me another
tight-mouthed look. "Let's get out of here as soon as we can. I don't
trust this fog."

I could
almost
see
little Fee
Bandolier standing on the side of the bed on a
cold night in November of 1950, holding onto his dying mother's arm
while his father lay unconscious on the floor, surrounded by empty beer
bottles.

"All
right?" John asked.

I nodded, and
he left the bedroom. I turned my back on the boy and walked out through
the mists and vapors that emanated from everything I thought about him
and went back through the living room toward the kitchen.

As in my old
house, the basement door was next to the stove. I went down the wooden
steps in the dark, letting my eyes adjust.

A long wooden
workbench stood across the gray concrete floor from the bottom of the
stairs. Against the wall above the back of the bench hung a row of
coffee cans and jam jars filled with nails and screws. Soon I made out
the shapes of boxes beneath the bench, and I exhaled with mingled
relief and triumph and went to the bench and bent down and pulled the
nearest box toward me.

It was about
the size of a case of whiskey, and the top of the box had been folded,
not taped, shut. I wrestled with the interlocking cardboard panels
before all four of them sprang free at once, revealing a layer of dark
fabric. Fee had wrapped his notes in cloth after seeing what the rats
had done to them in the Green Woman. I grabbed a loose handful of cloth
and pulled up. The cloth came out of the box without resistance.
Sleeves flopped out of the bundle. It was a suit jacket. I dropped it
on the floor and put my hands back into the box. This time I pulled out
the trousers to the suit. Beneath the trousers, carelessly folded, were
two more suits, one dark blue, the other dark gray. I stuffed the first
suit back into the box, pushed it back under the workbench, and pulled
another carton toward me. When I got the top open, I found a pile of
white shirts with Arrow labels. They were grimy from the dust sifting
down from the workbench and stiff with starch.

The next box
held three more suits folded onto a layer of wrinkled boxer shorts and
balled-up undershirts, the next a jumble of black shoes, and the final
one at least a hundred wide, late-forties neckties tangled together
like snakes. My knees creaked when I stood up.

Fee Bandolier
had expelled the Dumkys, cleaned up what was important to him, and
turned the lock on the door, sealing the past inside a bell jar.

A wide gray
spiderweb hung between the wringer of the old washing machine and the
slanting ledge of the small rectangular basement window in the wall
behind it. I walked slowly down the length of the basement. A black
bicycle the size of a Shetland pony leaned against the wall. I turned
toward the bulky furnace in the center of the basement, seeing another
row of boxes in the darkness. I moved forward, and the row of boxes
mutated into the long rectangular dish of a coaster wagon. I pushed it
with my foot, and it rolled backward on squeaking wheels, dragging its
wooden handle with it. When it moved, I saw another box hidden between
the coaster and the furnace.