Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [105]
“We’re not going to get off,” I said.
He glanced over at me, then away. “You’re already stoned.”
“I know it.”
“You look like hell, Tripp.”
“I know, I know, Crabtree, come on. I need you, man. I need you to come with me.”
“Come with you where?”
“Buddy.” Without intending to I found myself imitating Hannah’s manner with me. I hooked my finger over his belt buckle and gave it a sharp tug, and pulled him toward me and the front door. Crabtree dug in his heels and stayed where he was. “Won’t you just come with me if I ask you to?” I said. “Do I have to tell you where?”
“No, you don’t.” He unhooked my hand from his belt, turned it palm up, looked at it, and then tossed it back at me, as if refusing a corsage. He was bored enough to have forgotten that he was only pretending to be petulant. “You didn’t tell me where you were going this morning.”
“I know, I know, all right, I’m an asshole.” I didn’t blame him for being angry with me. I’d gotten him invited to WordFest, promising him our first chance to be together in months—years—then vanished, leaving him to attend dull seminars and oversimplistic lectures and to throw himself his own party with a bunch of woolen and funkless straight people. “I’m really, really sorry.”
“So how was everything up there, anyway?”
“Nice. Awful.”
“Emily still leaving you?”
“I would think so.” I shook my head. “To tell you the truth, it was a disaster. James—”
“My James?” Crabtree brightened, and touched his fingertips possessively to his breastbone. “Did he go with you? Is he here now?”
“No, and that’s why I need you, buddy.” I lowered my voice and brought my lips very close to his ear. “He kind of got himself—”
“Arrested?” he cried.
“Hush. No, kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped? Who by?”
I paused a moment for effect. “His parents,” I said.
Crabtree’s father was a Pentecostalist preacher somewhere out in Hogscrotum County, MO, and his mother was the editor-in-chief of a magazine for knitting-machine enthusiasts. “She can make you anything,” went a favorite line of his. “She made me a queer.” He had been lost to the clutch of Satan since early adolescence and hadn’t seen them in years.
“His parents?” It must have sounded to his ears like the direst of fates.
“He has ‘Frank Capra’ carved into the back of his hand.”
“Let me get my coat,” said Crabtree.
Launching himself like a swimmer from the wall, he dashed into the kitchen, retrieved his trench coat from the back of a chair, filched a half-empty bottle of Jim Beam from the kitchen table, and knocked back a swallow. Then he lit a cigarette and tied the belt of his overcoat around him. He slipped the Jim Beam into the left pocket of his coat, and on his way past the refrigerator stopped to fill the other pocket with a couple of little bottles of Mickey’s malt liquor. When he came back into the hall he was grinning and wide awake.
“Let’s buy a gun!” he said happily.
We went out to my car, and I was about to get in when Crabtree said, “Hey!”
He was standing at the back of the car, tapping on the lid of the trunk with the fingers of one hand.
“What?” I said, though I knew at once. “Oh.” I walked slowly around to the back. “I thought you said you didn’t want any.”
“I was lying.”
“I had a feeling.”
“Open the trunk.”
“How about we wait—”
“Open it.”
“I’m serious, Crabs, I—”
“Now.”
I opened the trunk.
“Holy Jesus,” said Crabtree. “You offed the husky dog.”
“No, wait a minute, Crab—”
“Phew!” The smell by now was indescribable, a compound of burnt aging automobile stinks and the natural odors of death and blood—sweet as garbage, acrid as gasoline, the smell of a thousand rubber tires rolled in batshit and then set on fire. “What is that?” Drawing the rest of his body away from the car, he extended his neck and poked his head out over the trunk, maneuvering it back and forth, over and back, as though it were a camera on a very long pole. Gingerly he withdrew his head and turned his wondering lens on me. “Is that a snake?” he said.
“Part of one,” I said. I put my hands on