Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [125]
“I don’t know. I skipped around.”
“Approximately, though. How much? Fifty pages? A hundred and fifty?”
“Enough. I read enough, Tripp.”
“Fuck, Crabtree, how much of it did you read?”
“Enough to know that I didn’t want to read any more.”
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Look, I’m sorry, Tripp. I’m more than sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He didn’t seem all that sorry. He was still spinning the wheel with aplomb, blowing giddy clouds of menthol smoke out the window. He was on the trail of Pea Walker and ready to negotiate for James’s salvation. “There’s nothing I can do with a book like that. Not now, I mean. It has too many problems. I hate to say it like this, Tripp, but I’m trying to be honest. For a change. I just can’t expend any time on Wonder Boys at the moment. I’m hanging by, like, three little molecules of thread at Bartizan. You know that. I need to hand them something fresh. Something snappy and fast. Something kind of pretty and perverted all at the same time.”
“Something like James,” I said.
“He’s my only hope,” said Crabtree, as we pulled up in front of Kravnik’s Sporting Goods and Outfitters. “If it isn’t already too late.”
“Too late,” I said, feeling hollow.
Kravnik’s took up the ground floor of a ten-story fireproof commercial block that, like most of the obsolete skyscrapers in this part of downtown, must once have been a bold flower of nineteenth-century capitalism. Its windows were filmed over with grime, and its stone face was tattooed with handbill glue. The sign, with its enormous red K, was ornamented at one side with a grotesque caricature of Bill Mazeroski, his skin bleached green by thirty years of weather. Translucent blue sunshades had been drawn over the grimy windows, so that they were all but impenetrable to the eye. It was one of an ever-dwindling number of such classic Pittsburgh establishments—half buried in dust and soot and an enigmatic mantle of central European gloom—that deal in rendering vats, piroshki presses, artificial wigs, and that regardless of the hour or day of the week always look as if they have been closed since the death of Guy Lombardo. There was a sign tacked to the front door of Kravnik’s, however, that claimed otherwise, in bright red letters.
“We’re in luck” I said. “It’s open.”
“Great,” said Crabtree. “Look, Tripp, just give me a couple of months, all right? Take a couple more months. Take a year. Pare it down. Finish the thing. I’ll be in a much better position to help you, you know, when you’re really done.”
“A couple of months.” I felt no sense of relief at finally being granted the reprieve I’d dreamt of for so many weeks. The promise had a weak, bureaucratic ring to it, and anyway—pare it down? How would I know what to pare when I wasn’t even sure anymore of what the whole thing was about? “Look,” I said, pointing, trying to sound cheerful. “‘Free Parking in Rear.’”
He nosed the car into a narrow passage that ran between Kravnik’s and the building beside it. As we pulled past the front of the store I tried to see in through the filthy aqueous windows but could glimpse only the dimmest outlines of headless mannequins, equipped for bizarre or outmoded sports—bearbaiting, the hammer throw, the hunting of stoat. We emerged into a large, irregular loading area, cluttered with Dumpsters and discarded wooden pallets, part of which served Kravnik’s as a makeshift parking lot. A few other narrow passages opened into the lot at odd intervals amid the surrounding buildings, and the whole thing was split down the middle by a broad central alley, running parallel to Third Avenue, all the way from Wood Street to Smithfield. There were half a dozen parking spaces designated as belonging to Kravnik’s and Crabtree pulled obediently into one of them, lining up between the stripes. Three spaces closer to the back of the store sat the Galaxie, empty, windows rolled; and beside this a ten-year-old Coupe