Wonder Boys (14 page)

“My knacksap;” he said, as his eyes flew open.

“His bag,” said Hannah. “You know that ratty green thing of his?”

James sent his pale hand spidering across his lap, his seat, the space around his long legs, then made a sudden grab for the door handle.

“You stay right here, little James,” I said, squeezing him back into the car. I waved to Crabtree, busy just then propping Q.’s string-puppet body against the side of my car, and called out that I was going to run in and look for James’s knapsack. Crabtree didn’t bother to look up. Before I could register the fact that he was ignoring me, however, I’d already tossed him my keys. They rang out against his left shoulder and then splashed into a puddle at his feet. He fired a nasty look at me across the parking lot before he knelt down to retrieve them, one restraining hand on Q.’s waist.

“Sorry,” I said.

As I limped back into the Hat and headed for our corner, the man we had fictionalized as Vernon Hardapple tried, without much success, to interpose his body between me and our table. His breath blew sour and warm at my face. His tall tsunami of hair had disintegrated into a kind of shivering pom-pom that stuck out all around his head. He was ready to mix it up with me.

“What were you looking at?” he asked me. His voice was raspy and his speech slow. Standing close to him I could see that his facial scars were the mark of some jagged and not very sharp object. “Something funny about me?”

“I wasn’t looking at you,” I said, smiling.

“Whose car you driving?”

“What’s that?”

“That 1966 emerald green Ford Galaxie 500, out there, with the license plate that say YAW 332. That your car?”

I said that it was.

“Bullshit,” he said, pushing lightly at my chest. “That’s mine, motherfucker.”

“I’ve had it for years.”

“Bull
shit
.” He brought his scarred face an inch closer to mine.

“It was my mother’s,” I said. Ordinarily I’m never too busy to get myself into a stupid argument with an angry and potentially dangerous person in an unsavory place. I was in a hurry to get James home and safely put to bed, however, and so I just brushed past him. “Excuse me.”

He lurched in front of me.

“What were you fuckers
looking
at?”

“We were admiring your hair,” I said.

He reached out for my chest as if to give me a shove. I took an involuntary step backward, and he stumbled against me. As he tried to regain his feet he tipped himself over sideways, and sprawled across the black Naugahyde seat of an empty booth behind him, which after a moment he found comfortable and appeared unwilling to leave.

“Sorry about your brother, Vernon,” I said.

Our table hadn’t been cleared yet. As I came closer I saw, underneath it, not James’s knapsack but what I believed for a heart-stopping instant to be the mangled body of a bird, lying dead on the orange carpet. It turned out to be my wallet. My charge plates and several of the engraved business cards Sara had ordered for me on my last birthday were scattered across the floor around the table. I gathered them up and slipped them back into the wallet, a fat black kidskin number Emily’s parents had brought back for me from their trip to Italy, cut wide to hold continental bills. I returned it to the breast pocket of my jacket, not even bothering to check if all the cash was still there, as if I’d left my elegant Florentine wallet lying on the floor on purpose, where I knew it would be perfectly safe. In any case I couldn’t have said how much cash there ought to have been. I started for the door, feeling perversely pleased, congratulating myself, as I always did at such moments, on not having been born an unlucky drunk. I tapped the comforting bulk of the wallet at my breast.

“See, now,” I told Vernon, passing by the booth in which he’d taken up residence. “You just have to learn to be lucky like me.”

Then I rolled on out of the Hat. My car and Hannah’s were idling side by side at the center of the nearly empty parking lot, trailing long plumes of exhaust, their windows misted over. There were two dark shapes sitting in the front seat of my car, the smaller one, on the passenger’s side, pitched a little to the right. For some reason it irritated me that Crabtree had gotten behind the wheel of Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie. I walked over to Hannah’s car and knocked on her window, and then the air around me was filled, an inch at a time, with the radiance of her face and with the wheezing of a tragic accordion. Hannah Green was big on tango music.

“No knacksap,” I said. “He must have left it back at Thaw.”

“Are you sure?” she said. “Maybe someone took it.”

“No. Nobody took it.”

“How do you know?”

I shrugged, and bent down to have a look at James. He’d slumped over against Hannah, now, and his head rested on her shoulder with an enviable snugness.

“Is he all right?” I said.

“I think so.” She gave the hair over his ear a few unconscious strokes. “I’m just going to get him home and onto the sofa.” She ducked her head and looked at me pleadingly. “The one in your office, all right?”

“In my office?”

“Yeah, you know it’s the best one for naps, Grady.” Over the course of the previous winter, as I read student writing or caught up on correspondence at my desk, Hannah had dozed off many times while studying on my old Sears Honor Bilt, her boot heels kicked up on the creaking armrest, her face sheltered under the tent of a sociology text.

“I don’t think it’s really going to make all that much difference to him right now, Hannah,” I said. “We could probably stand him up out in the garage with the snow shovels.”

“Grady.”

“All right. In my office.” I hung a couple of fingers over the edge of her window, and she reached up and took them in her own.

“See you at home” I said.

I walked around to the front of the Galaxie and waited for Crabtree to get out. The door swung open. Crabtree looked up at me, his face utterly blank.

“You shouldn’t drive,” he said.

“You should? I said. “Get in back.”

He continued to favor me with the polar expanse of his gaze for another moment, then shrugged, got out of the car, and climbed into the back. I slid in beside Q. and put the engine in gear. As I followed Hannah down the bumpy alley I was aware of a flickering shadow at the limit of my peripheral vision. The next moment there was something caught in my headlights, flagging us down with its wild dark arms. I braked. The arms cutting across the beams of light threw thirty-foot shadows against the screen of rainy air behind them.

“Jesus Christ,” said Q., in a strangled whisper, “
It’s him
.”

“What’s he want?” said Crabtree. It was only Vernon Hardapple again, but Q. seemed to be seeing someone else.

“Nothing,” I said. “I had a little problem with the guy when I went back inside the Hat.”

“Go around him, Grady.”

“All right,” I said.

“Oh my God,” said Q., squeezing his head between his hands, as though to shore it up against collapse.

“Grady, go around him!”

“All right!” I tried to tiptoe the car around him, but the alleyway was too narrow. One sidestep and he was standing in front of the car again. “Shit, man, there’s no room.” “Look at those pink scars on his cheek,” said Q., remembering himself. “It looks like he has another set of
lips
.”

“Back up, then, idiot!” said Crabtree.

“All right!” I said, throwing the car into reverse. I rolled us back into the Hi-Hat’s parking lot, then wrenched the wheel around to the left and, ignoring a one-way sign, started off down the alley in the other direction. Vernon was there, a funny, almost happy little smile on his face. I stepped on the brake again.

“Shit,” I said, just before he rocked back onto his heels, swung his arms forward, backward, forward again. You could see him moving his mouth as he one, two, threw himself onto the hood of my car. He landed on his ass, with a surprisingly gentle report, and then quickly slid down the hood of my car to the grille, legs extended, like a child sliding down a banister. He managed to alight on his feet, turned around, took a deep bow from which he almost didn’t recover, and aimed another blind smile through the windshield, directly at me. Then he disappeared.

“Who
was
that?” said Q., grinning with some odd but not unfamiliar combination of terror and delight. “What happened?”

“I had my car jumped on,” I said, as though this were a service the Hat provided to its very best customers.

“Is it all right?”

I hoisted myself up on the steering wheel and tried to see how the hood looked. The light in the alleyway was bad and I couldn’t see much of anything.

“I think it’s okay I said. “They made these things pretty heavy back then.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Crabtree. “Before he comes back with some friends.”

I took off down the alley, out onto the empty avenue, then headed down Baum Boulevard, feeling once again that I’d made a narrow but foreordained escape from danger.

“After we drop Q., here, Crabtree,” I said, “we have to make a stop at Thaw.”

“Uh huh,” said Crabtree. Now that the crisis was over, he settled back down into his sulk.

“I think James might’ve left his knapsack in the auditorium.”

“Great.”

“Do you remember seeing it when you, uh, escorted him out tonight?” I looked at him in the rearview mirror, and I didn’t like what I saw. Crabtree was sitting back, arms folded behind his head, watching dark storefronts and deserted filling stations slide past him, an expression on his face of dumb amusement, as though he were the happiest man in the world, and all that he saw around him only increased the value and hue of his contentment. It was the closest that he ever came to screaming. “Crabtree?”

“Tripp?”

“Yes, Crabtree?”

“Please go fuck yourself.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

“Isn’t this the way back to the college?” said Q. as we passed the Electric Banana.

“That’s right,” I said, impressed that he could recognize the route in the dark, drunk, after having seen it only once before.

“Well, I don’t know if—that is, I’m not staying at the college, Grady.”

“No?”

“No, I’m staying with the Gaskells.”

“Is that so?” For an instant the sole of my foot slipped free from the gas pedal, and the car drifted for a few hundred feet on momentum, slowing almost to a stop. “Well, it’s the way to their house, too,” I said, after I could breathe again. I replaced my foot on the accelerator and drove us out to Point Breeze.

“I wonder what happened to them, anyway?” Q. said when I headed down the street that led to the Gaskells’ driveway. The nearer we came to Sara’s house the less inclined I felt to go forward. We crept along the fence of fearsome iron spikes. “They just never showed up.”

In the end there was nothing more I could do to prevent it, and we turned into the Gaskells’ gravel drive. Sara and Walter garaged their cars at night, and the driveway looked desolate, the house abandoned. A pair of floods set amid the bushes on either side of the narrow front porch searched the face of the house, throwing their light across its bays and shutters and dormers, riddling it with odd shadows. The harsh floodlights seemed to be there not to illuminate so much as to identify, to mark the Gaskells’ house to passersby as one that had an infamous history, or was slated for imminent destruction. The wet wind blew through the branches of the pair of ancient apple trees in the front yard and filled the air with flowing scarves and snowdrifts of white petals. After a moment, I noticed that in an upstairs window a light was still dimly burning, and as I looked up something passed across the window blind. It was the window of Sara and Walter’s bedroom; they were still awake. I could go in with Q., right now, and tell them about the burden I was carrying around in the trunk of my car.

“See you tomorrow,” said Q., as he negotiated his way out of his safety belt. He worked the handle, and then pushed open the door with the toe of his Wallabee shoe. Wisely and with an air of long experience he took a moment to locate the ground before he tried to stand on it.

“Take it easy, now.” Crabtree slid across the backseat and climbed out of the car before Q. could slam the door on him. He shook Q.’s hand, steadying him a little as he did so, then got in beside me.

“I’m looking forward to your talk tomorrow, Terry.” Q. searched his pockets for a moment, a determined look on his face. His shirt was untucked, and the long thin strands of hair that he combed over his bald scalp were all standing on end, and I saw that in the course of the evening he had somehow managed to lose one of the temple pieces of his eyeglasses. When at last he found the key Sara must have given him, he looked so happy—so pleased with himself—that I had to turn away. I didn’t look back at the house until he was already inside it.

“His old doppelgänger must be feeling pretty good about things right now,” I said as we drove away. Crabtree said nothing. “What?” I asked him. “Come on, buddy. Don’t do this. Talk. What’s the matter?”

“Don’t you know?”

“You’re pissed off at me because I wouldn’t let you mess with poor James Leer.”

“Like it was any of your business.”

“You’re getting greedy, man,” I told him. “Wasn’t Miss Sloviak enough for one night?”

Crabtree repeated his earlier, anatomically impossible request of me. He had nothing further to add.

“Okay, look, I’m sorry,” I said, to no effect. I made a few more halfhearted attempts to apologize, then let it drop, and we drove on in silence. I started thinking all kinds of maudlin thoughts, about things like Doctor Dee’s empty food dish, and his rubber pork chop, and the length of leash chain hanging, forever slack now, from a bent nail in the pantry. Without knowing exactly how, I found myself, ten minutes later, in the service driveway alongside Thaw Hall, putting the car in park.

“Wait here,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

“Where would I go?” said Crabtree.

Yes, it was my lucky night. As I came around the side of the building to the front doors, I saw that the janitor was still at work, getting Thaw Hall ready for tomorrow’s busy schedule of exciting WordFest events. He was a tall, stooped, shaggy-haired white kid, dressed in a blue jumpsuit, dragging a vacuum cleaner back and forth behind him across the carpet of the lobby, with a kind of dazed industriousness, like a paperboy towing a wagon full of newsprint. When I rapped on the glass he seemed to recognize me, and I wondered if he could possibly have been a student of mine.