Wonder Boys (37 page)

Without answering I went around to the back of the Galaxie and opened the trunk. The tuba and the remains of poor Grossman were still lying there, apparently undiscovered. Grossman had done nothing overnight to improve the smell back here, and I wondered if Walker hadn’t been liberally dousing the interior of the car with Lucky Tiger in a doomed battle against the stench of rotten boa. I grabbed the battered instrument case in one hand, then took hold of Grossman with the other. He was stiff and heavy and gnarled as an ashplant.

“What the hell is that?” said Crabtree.

“What’s it look like?” I said. I figured the question would keep him occupied for a while. At the far side of the parking lot stood a disorderly battalion of green Dumpsters, and I headed toward them. Just as I started across the alley with my surrealistic burden I heard the squeal of a car low on power-steering fluid taking a tight curve, and looked up to see a familiar white delivery van, barreling toward me along the narrow passage Crabtree and I had come through a few minutes before. Pea Walker was in the passenger seat, and there was a much larger man, a white guy with a shaved scalp, behind the wheel, aiming the van straight at me. The guy’s tongue was curled at the corner of his mouth, as if he were concentrating very hard on attaining his goal. At a word from Walker, however, he cut the wheel and interposed the van between me and Hannah’s car, trapping me among the Dumpsters. Then he hit the brakes.

Walker hopped down from the van and without a word came toward me, a sprightly little hop in his gait, cocking his head to one side as if delighted to see me again. He was dressed in a splendid aubergine tracksuit and an elaborate pair of sneakers, his shoes and suit embellished like a Mayan codex with all sorts of cryptic glyphs and pictograms. He was carrying a big bottle of something twisted up in a plain brown sack, and now he set it down on the ground beside him, regretfully, and gave it a fond little pat on the head.

“Yo, Booger, the guy in the car,” he called to his friend.

Obediently the other fellow jumped down from the cab and went after Crabtree, who chose the odd defensive maneuver of sounding the Le Car’s horn a few times in succession. When that proved unsurprisingly ineffective he started to roll, backing out of the parking space, then executing a quick three-point turn that put him in the alley, pointed toward Wood Street. In the process, and quite by accident, he managed to knock down Booger, the bald boy, and iron out the wrinkles in his right foot with one pass of the left rear tire.

“Jesus!” said Booger. He lay there on the ground, propped up on his elbows. He looked insulted. I turned my attention back to Pea Walker, watching for the gun Clement had mentioned, but to my surprise as he came at me Walker brandished only his fists, working them around in the air before him like a kitten reaching for a string. They were thick and misshapen as the knuckles of an apple tree. I had at least a hundred pounds on him. I smiled. Walker smiled too. His eyes were bloodshot, his head teetered on his neck, and. he was missing several fairly important teeth from that smile of his. I wondered if he knew.

Right as I was considering the strategic value of just letting the guy hit me a few times with his washed-up-flyweight fists, he reached into the waistband of his purple warm-up suit and pulled out a ridiculously big piece the width of whose muzzle was exceeded only by that of his desolate smile. His firing hand wasn’t all that steady, but I supposed that at this range it didn’t need to be.

I made a feint to the left, and then cut toward the rolling Le Car. I was not so mobile, however, with my tuba and snake part, and he danced in front of me, cutting me off from Crabtree again.

“Hey, Pea,” I said.

“What up?” he said.

We stood there for a minute, a mangy, overweight purblind minotaur and a broken-down and toothless Theseus with a shaky shooting hand, facing each other at the common center of our disparate labyrinths. The wind had picked up considerably and the air around us was filled with dust devils and rattling gusts of rubbish.

“Tripp!” said Crabtree, in warning or as a kind of desperate wish. He was drifting off down the alleyway, slowly, as if he meant to give me one last chance to join him before he abandoned me once and for all.

Walker looked over at the Renault, and while his head was turned I raised the heavy staff of Grossman’s body over my head and—like Aaron, the silver-tongued shadow of Moses—hurled it at him. It struck him squarely in the face, with a loud crack, and he fell backward. The nine flew out of his hand and went clattering like an old roller skate across the parking lot. I ran down the alley, kicking through drifting strands of debris, swinging the tuba out ahead of me, the jacket tucked under my arm. I had my eyes fixed on the rickety knees of Booger, who was up again and hobbling after the Le Car—rather halfheartedly, it seemed to me. He probably had no idea whom he was chasing, or why. As for Crabtree, he could easily have outpaced Booger but he was still crawling along the alleyway at two miles per, with the passenger door hanging open, waiting for me. As soon as I drew even with the unfortunate Booger I brought the tuba around, aiming cruelly for his kneecaps. My aim was a little off, though, and I hit him in the belly instead, knocking the breath from his lungs in a single gust. He stumbled for a couple of steps before toppling over. A filthy tangle of packing tape and newspaper came rolling at him along the alley like a tumbleweed and adhered momentarily to the side of his head before blowing on past.

“You hit me with a tuba,” he said, looking at me with an air of hurt surprise.

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

A sheet of paper came whistling up and flattened itself against my face. I peeled it away. It was a piece of twenty-pound bond and glancing at it I found that it described the most awful moment of an inglorious chapter in the medical career of Culloden Wonder, chief scoundrel and patriarch of that inglorious clan. I looked over at the Le Car, and saw that Crabtree had been driving so slowly not because he was waiting for me but because he was engaged in an ongoing battle with the open door of the car, trying, all at the same time, to close it, to flee the alley, and, if possible, to prevent the wind from carrying off every last page of my novel. The air was filled with
Wonder Boys
; I saw now that its pages made up a fair portion of the trash that was blowing through the alleyway and across the parking lot. Pages were settling like fat snowflakes on Booger, and brushing up like kittens against my legs.

“Jesus,” I said. “Crabtree, stop the car!”

Crabtree stopped and climbed out, and together we started to try to save what we could, plucking sheets of paper from the air, raking them like leaves from the pavement.

“I’m so sorry, man” he said. He made a leaping grab for one high-flying page but missed by an inch, and it sailed away. “I didn’t notice.”

“How many pages did you lose?”

“Not too many.”

“Are you sure?” I said. “Crabtree, it looks like a fucking blizzard out here.”

There was a small explosion behind us. We turned and saw Walker crouching on one knee by the white van, the nine held out at the end of a wavering arm.

“Shit!” said Booger, clutching at the sudden bright blossom on the sleeve of his right arm.

“Jesus Christ,” said Crabtree, grabbing hold of me, dragging me toward the car. “Come on!”

I threw the tuba into the backseat, handed Crabtree Marilyn’s jacket, and climbed in beside him, and then we abandoned my novel to the parking lot of Kravnik’s Sporting Goods, leaving it to stream out behind us like the foamy white wake of a boat.

B
REATHLESS WITH SUCCESS
, Crabtree immediately set about recapitulating the events of the last twenty minutes, fixing the least details of our escapade in place with the narrative equivalent of watchmaker’s tweezers and embellishing the overall contours of the plot with the rhetorical equivalent of a fire hose.

“Did you see that Booger’s tattoo? On the back of his hand? It was the ace of hearts, but the heart was black. I could smell his breath, Tripp, he’d been drinking a Yoo-Hoo, I swear to God. I thought he was going to kiss me. Christ, he was ugly. Both of them were. How about that gun, huh? Was that a nine millimeter? It was, wasn’t it? Jesus. Those bullets sounded like fucking hummingbirds.”

There was already a short chapter in Crabtree’s hypothetical autobiography entitled “People Who Have Shot at Me,” and now as he drove us out to the college he painstakingly revised it, commencing with an episode that had befallen both of us some eleven years earlier, when I’d helped him try to sneak his lover at the time, the painter Stanley Feld, into the East Hampton home of an art-collecting lawyer who’d reneged on a promise to let Feld visit the painting he considered his best work; like all our greatest escapades this was a noble enterprise in theory rendered hopelessly foolish from the first moments of execution, in this case by Feld’s having neglected to mention that the collector in question was an art-loving Mafia lawyer, and that not only his collection but his entire walled estate was guarded by heavily armed half-men whose aim, fortunately, was less than perfect. From this incident, in which a round of automatic weapons fire tore the branch off a spruce tree several feet over our heads, Crabtree made the natural transition to the two angry shots fired at him, six months later, by Stanley Feld, one of which lodged in his left buttock.

Now he had a new section to add to this favorite hypothetical chapter, and I could see that he was delighted to do the work.

“Chaos,” he said, rolling his window down, breathing it in like the smell of cut grass or the ocean. He shook his head admiringly. “What a mess.”

“No kidding,” I said, looking down at the pathetic remnant of
Wonder Boys
in my lap. I ought to have been pounding on the dashboard, I thought, and eulogizing sweet chaos, the opposite and the inhibitor of death, and stating, for the record, that Vernon Hardapple’s breath had carried an anise whiff of Italian sausage and a rusty tang of beer. Ever since the day, nearly twenty-five years before, that I’d first fallen under the spell of Jack Kerouac and his free-form Arthurian hobo jazz, with all its dangerous softheartedness and poor punctuation, I had always, consciously and by some unthinking reflex of my heart, taken it as an article of faith that escapades like the rescue of James Leer from his Sewickley Heights dungeon, or the retrieval of the missing jacket, were intrinsically good: good for the production of literature, good for barroom conversation, good for the soul. Chaos! I ought to have been gulping it down the way Knut Hamsun, perched atop a locomotive as it hurtled across the American heartland, swallowed a thousand miles of icy air in a successful attempt to rid his body of tubercles. I ought to have been welcoming the bright angel of disorder into my life like the prickling flow of blood into a limb that had fallen asleep.

Instead, I spent the whole trip out to the college trying to assess and come to grips with the fatal blow that had been dealt to the manuscript of
Wonder Boys
. Crabtree, as it turned out, had managed to prevent exactly seven pages from blowing out of the car. They were all impressed with the watermark of his Vibram soles, or pebbled like the surface of a basketball with a relief of asphalt; part of one page had been torn away. Two thousand six hundred and four pages—seven years of my life!—abandoned in the alley behind Kravnik’s Sporting Goods, with a run-down Ford and three quarters of a dead snake. I shuffled through the remains, numb, wondering, a busted shareholder in the aftermath of a crash, clutching the sheaf of ink and rag paper that only an hour before had been all my fortune. It was a completely random sample from the novel, pages bearing no relation to one another except for two which coincidentally both dealt with the birthmark on Helena Wonder’s behind that was shaped like her native state of Indiana. I allowed my head to fall backward against the headrest. I closed my eyes.

“Seven pages,” I said. “Six and a half.”

“Naturally you have copies,” said Crabtree.

I didn’t say anything.

“Tripp?”

“I have earlier drafts,” I said. “I have alternate versions.”

“You’ll be all right, then,” he said.

“Sure, I will. It’ll probably come out better next time.”

“That’s what they say,” he said. “Look at Carlyle, when he lost his luggage.”

“That was Macaulay.”

“Or Hemingway, when Hadley lost all those stories.”

“He was never able to reproduce them.”

“Bad example,” said Crabtree. “Here we are.”

He turned into the long avenue of tulip trees that led up Founder’s Hill to the center of campus, and I directed him toward Arning Hall, where the English faculty kept office hours. We parked in the tiny faculty lot, in the space reserved for our Miltonist. Crabtree checked his watch and ran a cocksure hand through his long hair. There was still half an hour until the Farewell, the closing ceremonies of WordFest, was scheduled to begin—thirty minutes to set up his monte table and his trick manacles and his box with the hidden chamber, and tie a few balloon animals for Walter Gaskell. He reached into the backseat for the black satin skeleton key that would spring James Leer. Then he got out of the car and pulled on his own suit jacket. He shot his cuffs and worked a stiffness out of the muscles of his neck. He lit another Kool Mild.

“Wanna come?”

“Not particularly.”

Crabtree ducked his head back into the car and gave me a quick once-over, more for his benefit than my own, the way an actor about to go onstage will nervously check the costume of a fellow cast member whose cue is still two scenes off. He slid my eyeglasses up the bridge of my nose with his index finger.

“You going to be all right?”

“You bet. Uh, Crabtree,” I said. “Tell me if I’m wrong. It sounded to me like you aren’t going to do this book at all. Am I wrong about that?”

“Yes. Look, Grady, I don’t want you to think …” He let the sentence go. It was hard seeing Crabtree unable to choose among all the different unthinkable things he didn’t want me to think. “But—perhaps—in a sense—perhaps this”—he nodded toward the little puddle of
Wonder Boys
in my lap—“is for the best.”