Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [106]
“Not so fast.” He grabbed hold of my wrist. “I want my medicines.” After a brief struggle he wrested the trunk lid away from me and raised it once more. “I don’t care if you have a dead cassowary in there.” Carefully he reached into a far comer of the trunk and, wrinkling up his nose, started to feel his way around.
“Ick,” he said.
WE PULLED INTO SEWICKLEY Heights around three A.M. and rolled with the top down through its sinuous dark streets. The sidewalks were overarched with immense sycamores and lined with high hedges that hid the grand houses behind them. Crabtree was holding a Greater Pittsburgh street map and, pressed between his lips, an overdue notice from the college library, which had been mailed two weeks before to a James Selwyn Leer at 262 Baxter Drive. The Leers were unlisted, as we’d discovered in a Shell station telephone booth, but the ever-resourceful Crabtree had dug around in James’s knapsack and found the notice, stuck between two pages of the Errol Flynn biography. He had the knapsack balanced on his lap.
“The address on the manuscript?” said Crabtree, angling the street map, the better to catch the dim glow of the glove compartment light. “5225 Harrington?”
“His aunt’s house. In Mt. Lebanon.”
“I’m looking at the index, here. There’s no such street.”
“How surprising.”
Driving out to the suburbs I’d filled Crabtree in on most of what had happened to James Leer and me since I’d taken his shiny little pistol away from him the night before; the things I had learned and unlearned about him. I skipped the part about Marilyn Monroe’s jacket, though. I told myself I had the thing all nice and folded up into a neat little bundle on the backseat, so I ought just to leave it like that until tomorrow, when I would drive James over to the Gaskells’ and finally set everything straight; but the truth was that I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to have to try to explain to Crabtree what James and I were doing up there in the Gaskells’ bedroom in the first place. So I said that it was just a crazy accident that James had shot Doctor Dee. As I talked about James and his book, Crabtree seemed to grow convinced not only that the young man must be a good writer—he gave The Love Parade a quick editorial flip-through on the way out, reading by the light from the glove box—but that he, Terry Crabtree, Agent of Chaos, was the switch failure on the tracks toward which James Leer’s train was inexorably hurtling. I offered him a little account of my sad dealings with Emily and the Warshaws, too, but he didn’t seem all that interested, frankly, in my problems, or at least that was what he wanted me to think. He was still angry with me for having abandoned him that morning. As for Wonder Boys, he made no mention of it, and I was afraid to ask. If he’d looked at it and had nothing to say to me, then that told me plenty right there.
“Baxter’s next,” he said, looking up from the map.
I took it, guessing left. The numbers started at 230 and went up. I cut the lights, and as we drew closer to 262 I cut the engine, too. Silently we coasted until we pulled up abreast of the Leers’ driveway. There were pillars on either side, topped with stone pineapples. A fence of nasty-looking iron javelins ran off for a hundred feet in either direction and disappeared into the shadows. We got out of the car and gently let the doors fall shut. Then we took a couple of tentative steps into the Leers’ driveway, a rolled-out winding ten-mile river of finest country-club gravel, round as polished hematites and opals, that described a number of lazy meanders across the hundred feet of lawn which separated us from the wide front porch. The porch had to be wide, in order to wrap itself all the way around the Leers’ house, an eccentric pile of fieldstone and shingles, bristling with awnings and trusses and pointy dormers that stuck out in every direction, all jumbled together under a collection of gambreled eaves. The front door and indeed a fair portion of the