Tonight Mr Hanscom looked a little pale, a little distracted.
'Hello, Ricky Lee,' he said, sitting down, and then fell to studying his hands.
Ricky Lee knew he was slated to spend the next six or eight months in Colorado Springs, overseeing the start of the Mountain States Cultural Center, a sprawling six-building complex which would be cut into the side of a mountain. When it's done people are going to say itlooks like a giant-kid left his toy blocks all over a flight of stairs, Ben had told Ricky Lee. Some will, anyway, and they'll be at least half-right. But I think it's going to work. It's the biggest thing I've ever tried and putting it up is going to be scary as hell, but I think it's going to work.
Ricky Lee supposed it was possible that Mr Hanscom had a little touch of stage fright. Nothing surprising about that, and nothing wrong about it, either. When you got big enough to be noticed, you got big enough to come gunning for. Or maybe he just had a touch of the bug. There was a hell of a lively one going around.
Ricky Lee got a beer stein from the backbar and reached for the Olympia tap.
'Don't do that, Ricky Lee.'
Ricky Lee turned back, surprised — and when Ben Hanscom looked up from his hands, he was suddenly frightened. Because Mr Hanscom didn't look like he had stage fright, or the virus that was going around, or anything like that. He looked like he had just taken a terrible blow and was still trying to understand whatever it was that had hit him.
Someone died. He ain't married but every man's got a fambly, and someone in his just bit the dust. That's what happened, just as sure as shit rolls downhill front a privy.
Someone dropped a quarter into the juke-box, and Barbara Mandrell started to sing about a drunk man and a lonely woman.
'You okay, Mr Hanscom?'
Ben Hanscom looked at Ricky Lee out of eyes that suddenly looked ten — no, twenty — years older than the rest of his face, arid Ricky Lee was astonished to observe that Mr Hanscom's hair was graying. He had never noticed any gray in his hair before.
Hanscom smiled. The smile was ghastly, horrible. It was like watching a corpse smile.
'I don't think I am, Ricky Lee. No sir. Not tonight. Not at all.'
Ricky Lee set the stein down and walked back over to where Hanscom sat. The bar was as empty as a Monday-night bar far outside of football season can get. There were fewer than twenty paying customers in the place. Annie was sitting by the door into the kitchen, playing cribbage with the short-order cook.
'Bad news, Mr Hanscom?'
'Bad news, that's right. Bad news from home. ' He looked at Ricky Lee. He looked through Ricky Lee.
'I'm sorry to hear that, Mr Hanscom.'
'Thank you, Ricky Lee.'
He fell silent and Ricky Lee was about to ask him if there was anything he could do when Hanscom said:
'What's your bar whiskey, Ricky Lee?'
'For everyone else in this dump it's Four Roses,' Ricky Lee said. 'But for you I think it's Wild Turkey.'
Hanscom smiled a little at that. 'That's good of you, Ricky Lee. I think you better grab that stein after all. What you do is fill it up with Wild Turkey.'
'Fill it?' Ricky Lee asked, frankly astonished. 'Christ, I'll have to roll you out of here!' Or call an ambulance, he thought.
'Not tonight,' Hanscom said. 'I don't think so.'
Ricky Lee looked carefully into Mr Hanscom's eyes to see if he could possibly be joking, and it took less than a second to see that he wasn't. So he got the stein from the backbar and the bottle of Wild Turkey from one of the shelves below. The neck of the bottle chattered against the rim of the stein as he began to pour. He watched the whiskey gurgle out, fascinated in spite of himself. Ricky Lee decided it was more than just a touch of the Texan that Mr Hanscom had in him: this had to be the biggest goddamned shot of whiskey he ever had poured or ever would pour in his life.
Call an ambulance, my ass. He drinks this baby and I'll be calling Parker and Waters in Swedholm for their funeral hack.
Nevertheless he brought it back and set it down in front of Hanscom; Ricky Lee's father had once told him that if a man was in his right mind, you brought him what he paid for, be it piss or poison. Ricky Lee didn't know if that was good advice or bad, but he knew that if you tended bar for a living, it went a fair piece toward saving you from being chomped into gator-bait by your own conscience.
Hanscom looked at the monster drink thoughtfully for a moment and then asked, 'What do I owe you for a shot like that, Ricky Lee?'
Ricky Lee shook his head slowly, eyes still on the steinful of whiskey, not wanting to look up and meet those socketed, staring eyes. 'No,' he said. 'This one is on the house.'
Hanscom smiled again, this time more naturally. 'Why, I thank you, Ricky Lee. Now I am going to show you something I learned about in Peru, in 1978. I was working with a guy named Frank Billings — understudying with him, I guess you'd say. Frank Billings was the
best damned architect in the world, I think. He caught a fever and the doctors injected about a billion different antibiotics into him and not a single one of them touched it. He burned for two weeks and then he died. What I'm going to show you I learned from the Indians who worked on the project. The local popskull is pretty potent. You take a slug and you think it's going down pretty mellow, no problem, and then all at once it's like someone lit a blowtorch in your mouth and aimed it down your throat. But the Indians drink it like Coca-Cola, and I rarely saw one drunk, and I never saw one with a hangover. Never had the sack to try it their way myself. But I think I'll give it a go tonight. Bring me some of those lemon wedges there.'
Ricky Lee brought him four and laid them out neatly on a fresh napkin next to the stein of whiskey. Hanscom picked one of them up, tilted his head back like a man about to administer eyedrops to himself, and then began to squeeze raw lemon-juice into his right nostril.
'Holy Jesus!' Ricky Lee cried, horrified.
Hanscom's throat worked. His face flushed . . . and then Ricky Lee saw tears running down the flat planes of his face toward his ears. Now the Spinners were on the juke, singing about the rubberband-man. 'Oh Lord, I just don't know how much of this I can stand,' the Spinners sang.
Hanscom groped blindly on the bar, found another slice of lemon, and squeezed the juice into his other nostril.
'You're gonna fucking kill yourself,' Ricky Lee whispered.
Hanscom tossed both of the wrung-out lemon wedges onto the bar. His eyes were fiery red and he was breathing in hitching, wincing gasps. Clear lemon-juice dripped from both of his nostrils and trickled down to the corners of his mouth. He groped for the stein, raised it, and drank a third of it. Frozen, Ricky Lee watched his adam's apple go up and down.
Hanscom set the stein aside, shuddered twice, then nodded. He looked at Ricky Lee and smiled a little. His eyes were no longer red.