Read Online The Throat by Peter Straub - Free Book Online Page B

the stewardess and saw April seated in the last seat of the last
row in first class, looking out of the window with her chin on her
fist. I faced forward and held my breath. When I looked around again,
the seat was empty.
9
    This is where I dip my buckets, where I fill my pen.
10
    MY first book, A Beast in View ,
was about a false identity, and it turned out that The Divided Man was also about a
mistaken identity. I was haunted by William Damrosch, a true child of
the night, who intrigued me because he seemed to be both a decent man
and a murderer. Along with Millhaven, I assumed that he was guilty. Koko was essentially about a
mistaken identity and Mystery was about the greatest mistake ever made by Lamont von Heilitz,
Millhaven's famous private detective. He thought he had identified a
murderer, and that the murderer had then committed suicide. These books
are about the way the known story is not the right or the real story. I
saw April because I missed her and wanted to see her, also because she
wanted me to know that the real story had been abandoned with the past.
Which is to say that part of me had been waiting for John Ransom's
phone call ever since I read and reread the Ledger's description of William
Damrosch's body seated dead before his desk. The empty bottle and the
empty glass, the dangling gun, the words printed on the piece of
notebook paper. The block letters.
    The man I killed face to face jumped up in front of me on a trail
called Striker Tiger. He wore glasses and had a round, pleasant face
momentarily rigid with amazement. He was a bad soldier, worse even than
me. He was carrying a long wooden rifle that looked like an antique. I
shot him and he fell straight down, like a puppet, and disappeared into
the tall grass. My heart banged. I stepped forward to look at him and
imagined him raising a knife or lifting that antique rifle where he lay
hidden in the grass. Yet I had seen him fall the way dead birds fall
out of the sky, and I knew he was not lifting that rifle. Behind me a
soldier named Linklater was whooping, "Did you see that? Did you see
Underdown nail that gook?" Automatically I said, "Underhill." Conor
Linklater had some minor mental disorder that caused him to jumble
words and phrases. He once said, "The truth is in the pudding." Here is
the pudding. I felt a strange, violent sense of triumph, of having won ,
like a blood-soaked gladiator in an arena. I went forward through the
grass and saw a leg in the black trousers, then another leg opened
beside it, then his narrow chest and outftung arms, finally his head.
The bullet had entered his throat and torn out the back of his neck. He
was like the mirror image of Andrew T. Majors, over whose corpse I had
become a pearl diver for the body squad. "You got him, boy," said Conor
Linklater. "You got him real good." The savage sense of victory was
gone. I felt empty. Below his thin ankles, his feet were as bony as
fish. From the chin up he looked as if he were working out one of those
algebra problems about where two trains would meet if they were
traveling at different speeds. It was clear to me that this man had a
mother, a father, a sister, a girlfriend. I thought of putting the
barrel of my M-16 in the wound in his throat and shooting him all over
again. People who would never know my name, whose names I would never
know, would hate me. (This thought came later.) "Hey, it's okay," Conor
said. "It's okay, Tim." The lieutenant told him to button his lip, and
we moved ahead on Striker Tiger. While knowing I would not, I almost
expected to hear the man I had killed crawling away through the grass.
11
    ON the morning of the day that John Ransom called me, I shuddered
awake all at once. A terrible dream clung to me. I jumped out of bed to
shake it off, and as soon as I was on my feet I realized that I had
only been dreaming. It was just past six. Early June light burned
around the edges of the curtain near my bed. I looked down from my
platform over the loft