Wonder Boys (12 page)

“Figures,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, because this is the kind of a gun that, you know, like, Bette Davis would carry? In her beaded purse?” He grinned. “I bet that kid would be much happier if he could be Bette Davis shooting herself, instead of some big-lipped little boy in a stinky old overcoat.”

Tony closed his fingers around the gun, and his lids with their long eyelashes fluttered twice and then closed. He brought the pistol delicately to his lips. Though I knew the gun was empty now, I was frightened at the sight of that. For the first time it registered in my weedy old brain that James Leer, my student, had intended to kill himself that evening.

“I’d better go,” I said. “I think I need to rescue James Leer.”

Tony lowered the pistol and started to give it back to me. I pushed his hand away.

“Keep it. I think it suits you.”

“Thanks.” He looked up at the dark, shuttered face of the house and frowned. “I just might need it myself.”

“Ha,” I said, fumbling in my jacket pocket for my car keys. I knew I’d been holding them a second or two before.

“Hey, you know, uh, Grady, maybe I’d just go on home if I were you,” said Tony, as I got back into my car. “You look to me like you need to rescue yourself.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” I closed my eyes. I saw myself pulling into the driveway of our ivy-clad house on Denniston Street, hanging my coat on the newel post of our stairs, falling down backward into the fragrant riot of coverlets and bedclothes on our never-made bed. Then I remembered that there was nothing, no one, waiting for me at home. Without really wanting to, I opened my eyes and nodded once to Tony. I started to roll up my window, then stopped. “Oh, shit, buddy,” I said. “What about that fucking tuba?”

“Keep it,” said Tony. He reached out and slapped me three times softly on the cheek, as you might pat the tremulous cheek of a baby. “It suits you.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, and rolled up the window. As I pulled away from the curb, heading back up Juniper Street, I watched in the rearview mirror as Tony Sloviak, carrying his bags, climbed the long stairway up to his father’s house, past the benedictory embrace of Our Lady, his little black dog nipping at his heels with every step he took.

C
RABTREE AND
I
HAD
discovered the Hi-Hat together, in the course of one of his first visits to Pittsburgh, during the period between my second and third marriages—the last great era of our friendship, of our pirate days, before stars were lost from certain constellations, when the woods and railroad wastes and dark street corners of the world still concealed Indians and poetical madmen and razor-sharp women with the eyes of tarot-card queens. I was still a monstrous thing then, a Yeti, a Swamp Thing, the chest-thumping Sasquatch of American fiction. I wore my hair long and tipped the scales at an ungraceful but dirigible two hundred and thirty-five pounds. I exercised my appetites freely, with a young man’s wild discipline. I moved my big frame across the floors of barrooms like a Cuban dancer with a knife in his boot and a hibiscus in the band of his Panama hat.

We found Carl Franklin’s Hi-Hat, or the Hat, as it was known to regulars, on the Hill, stranded in a forlorn block of Centre Avenue between the boarded-up storefront of a Jewish fish wholesaler and a medical supply company whose grimy display windows featured, and had gone on featuring ever since, a miniature family of headless and limbless human torsos dressed up in exact, tiny replicas of hernia trusses. On the avenue side there were only a fire door and a rusted sign that said
FRANKLIN’S
in looping script; you got in through the alley around back, where you found a small parking lot and a large man named Clement, who was there to look you over, assess your character, and pat you down if he thought you might be packing. He didn’t come off as a very nice person the first time you met him, and he never got any friendlier. The owner, Carl Franklin, was a local boy—he’d grown up on Conkling Street, a few blocks away—who’d worked as a drummer in big bands and small combos during the fifties and sixties, including a stint in one of the late Ellington configurations, and then come home to open the Hi-Hat as a jazz supper club, aiming to attract a class clientele. There was a beautiful old Steinway grand, a luminous bar of glass brick, and the walls were still hung with photographs of Billy Eckstine, Ben Webster, Erroll Garner, Sarah Vaughan; but the place had long since devolved into a loud R & B joint, lit with pink floodlights, smelling of hair spray, spilt beer, and barbecue sauce, catering to a shadowy, not particularly sociable crowd of middle-aged black men and their ethnically varied but uniformly irritable dates.

I remember that I had been dangling unhappily from the rope of my new life as an English professor in Pittsburgh for about three months, friendless, bored, and living alone in a cramped flat over a Ukrainian coffee shop on the South Side, when Crabtree showed up, dressed in a knee-length leather policeman’s coat, with a sheet of Mickey Mouse acid and sixty-five hundred dollars in severance pay from a men’s fashion magazine that had just decided to fire its literary editor and get out of the unprofitable fiction business once and for all. I was so glad to see him. We set out immediately to reconnoiter the bars of my new hometown—Danny’s, Jimmy Post’s, the Wheel, all of them gone now—landing in the Hat, on a Saturday night, when the Blue Roosters, the house band at that time, were joined onstage by a visiting Rufus Thomas. We were not only drunk but tripping our brains out, and thus our initial judgment of the welcome the Hat afforded us and of the level of the entertainment was not entirely accurate—we were under the impression that everybody there loved us, and as I recall we also believed that Rufus was singing the French lyrics of “My Way” to the tune of “Walkin’ the Dog.” At a certain point in the evening, furthermore, one of the patrons was badly beaten, out in the alley, and came stumbling back into the Hat with his ear hanging loose; Crabtree and I, having consumed four orders of barbecued ribs, then spent a fiery half hour unconsuming them, taking turns over the toilet in the men’s room. We’d been going back ever since, every time Crabtree came to town.

It was about ten-thirty when I walked into the Hat and submitted myself to the X-ray gaze of Clement. I was glad that I’d thought to give Tony Sloviak the little gun; it was said that if you tried to enter the Hat with a weapon concealed even in the innermost recess of your body, Clement would still do what was necessary to relieve you of it. The house band was between sets, and the jukebox was playing Jimmie Rodgers. I stood a moment on the apron of baby-aspirin-orange carpeting that ran all the way around the lounge, trying to get my bearings. It had been a couple of years since my last visit and things seemed to have deteriorated. The plywood subfloor showed through the carpet, which was pocked with cigarette burns and stained everywhere by substances whose nature I didn’t care to speculate on. The wall of mirrored tile was gapped like a bad smile with empty spaces. Behind the bandstand someone had defaced the big mural, which showed the proprietor wailing away behind an enormous fortress of a drum kit. His sticks were each equipped now with a pair of hairy testicles and he sported a Dalí mustache. The dance floor was dimpled with heel marks. I looked around, expecting to see a couple of tables surrounded by writers and WordFesters and a cloud of pink smoke, but there was only the usual crowd of Hat regulars, looking at me with expressions of derision or mild annoyance. I have no doubt that my face held a stupid aspect.

Out on the floor there were a handful of couples doing the buckethead and the barracuda and the cold Samoan, to the weary and inexorable groove of “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” and near the center of the crowd of dancers were Hannah Green and Q., the man who haunted his own life. Hannah was an ungraceful but energetic dancer, capable of admirable feats of pelvic abandon, but the best you could say for old Q. was that he was making no effort to cling to some outmoded notion of dignity. It sounds uncharitable of me to say so, I know, but his attention seemed to be occupied less by his own movements than by the slow vertical mambo of Hannah Green’s breasts. I waved to Hannah, who smiled at me, and when I looked around and gave my shoulders an exaggerated shrug, she pointed to a table in a far corner, away from the dancers, the bandstand, and all the other customers. At this table sat Crabtree and James Leer, behind a long, crazy skyline of Iron City bottles. James was slouched down in his chair, his head tilted against the wall, his eyes closed. He looked almost as if he might be asleep. As for Crabtree, he was staring off at, or past, the people dancing, with an expression of happy concentration. His arm was extended down and away from his body, at a delicate angle, as though he were about to choose a bonbon from a tray. His hand, however, wasn’t in evidence; it had disappeared under the table, in the general vicinity of James Leer’s lap. I shot what must’ve been a fairly panicked look at Hannah, who bared her teeth and screwed up her eyes, the way you do when an ambulance goes screaming by.

I stopped a waitress on my way over to the table and asked her to bring me a shot of George Dickel. By the time I got there, Crabtree’s hands were both visible, and James was sitting more or less upright, his cheeks flushed. The high, flawless forehead that had led me to believe him a rich boy looked feverish, and his eyes were lustrous with something that might have been either euphoria or fear.

“How are you feeling, James?” I said.

“I’m drunk,” he said, sounding very sincere. “I’m sorry, Professor Tripp.”

I sat down beside Crabtree, glad to be off my feet. The pain in my ankle was getting worse.

“You’re all right, James,” I said, feeding him the same smile of reassurance I’d already fed him twice that day; the first time as his story was hung up for slaughter in workshop, and the second as I led him into the Gaskells’ bedroom, telling him that everything was fine. “Everything’s fine.”

“Sure it is,” said Crabtree. He handed me his bottle of beer, half full, and I tipped it back and took a long warm swallow. “Thought we’d lost you, Tripp.”

“Where is everyone?” I said, setting the empty bottle before him with a flourish, as though I’d just performed some alcoholic parlor trick. “Did it work out to be just the four of you?”

“Nobody else showed up,” said Crabtree. “Sara and what’s his name, Walter, they said they were going to go home first and then meet us here. But I guess they just decided to stay home. Curl up on the sofa with the dog.”

I glanced at James, expecting a little guilt to show in his face, but he was too far gone for that. I doubted if he even remembered what he had done. He’d started to wink out again, his head drifting back against the wall.

“Is that just beer?” I said, jerking my head in his direction.

“Primarily,” said Crabtree. “Although I gather you two staged a little raid on the Crabtree pharmacopoeia.’

“That was a while ago,” I said, reaching down to press my fingers against the bandage on my ankle. “He shouldn’t be feeling any of that anymore.”

“Well, you two missed a few bottles the first time,” he said. He tapped the hip pocket of his dollar green jacket. “And James here was curious.” He turned to watch the young man as his lips parted and a tiny flag of saliva flew from one corner of his mouth.

“He’s out,” I said.

We sat for a moment, watching the regular rise and fall of James Leer’s chest within his glen plaid shirt. The skinny little tie had come halfway unknotted and drooped at his throat like a blown flower. Crabtree dabbed at the ribbon of spit with the corner of a cocktail napkin, tenderly, as though wiping a baby’s mouth.

“He has a book,” said Crabtree. “I hear he has a novel.”

“I know it. Something about a parade. Love parade.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just found out myself tonight. He’s carrying it around in that knapsack of his.”

“Is he any good?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet he isn’t.”

“I want to read it,” said Crabtree. An oily lock of hair had fallen down across James Leer’s forehead, and he reached out to brush it back.

“Come on, Crabtree.” I lowered my voice. “Don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what?”

“He’s a kid,” I said. “He’s my student, man. I’m not even sure if he’s—”

“He is,” said Crabtree. “Take my word for it.”

“I don’t believe that he is,” I said. “I think it’s more complicated than that. I want you to leave him alone.”

“Is that so?”

“He’s really fucked up right now, Crabtree.” I lowered my voice all the way to a whisper. “I think he was planning to off himself tonight. Maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, he’s a mess. He’s a disaster. I don’t think he needs sexual confusion thrown into the mix right this minute.”

“On the contrary,” said Crabtree, “it could be just the ticket. Hey, what’s the matter, Grady?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Looked like you just, I don’t know, winced.”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s my foot. My foot’s killing me.”

“Your foot? What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I just—I fell.”

“Yeah, you know, you look kind of shaken up,” he said. His eyes had lost their fevered Cortés luster, and I thought I saw real tenderness in them for the first time all night. Our chairs were pushed close together and he leaned his shoulder against mine. I could still smell Tony’s perfume on his cheek. The waitress arrived with my shot of Dickel and I sipped at it, feeling the slow poison work its way into my heart;

“I like the way she dances,” said Crabtree, looking out across the floor toward Hannah Green and Q. The selection now playing was “Ride Your Pony,” by Lee Dorsey. One of the many features that marked the Hat as a survivor of the great lost era of Pittsburgh dives was its telephone jukebox. There was no actual box, only a coin-operated telephone, black and heavy as an old steam iron, mounted on a pillar at one end of the dance floor. Attached to this phone by an oft-repaired length of wire was a dog-eared, barbecue-stained playlist, typed a million years ago by some manic alphabetist, that featured over five thousand selections, grouped by genre. You picked your songs, dropped your quarters, and had a drunken, shouted conversation with an old Slovenian lady hidden away somewhere in Pittsburgh inside an underground bunker of black vinyl. A few minutes later you would hear your songs. At one time, according to Sara, many bars in town had been so equipped, but now the Hat was one of the last. “She shows a heavy Pharaonic influence, I’d say, in the elbow movements. With perhaps just a soupçon of Snoopy in the feet.”