Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [126]
“Wait here,” I said, opening my door. I set Wonder Boys down on the seat, and fished around in my pocket for the keys to the Galaxie. “Be ready to leave quickly.”
“I’m ready now,” said Crabtree, half humorously. “Seriously, Tripp, don’t you think we ought to just talk to him? I wasn’t planning on our having to, you know, actually burgle anything this morning.”
“The guy isn’t going to want to talk to us,” I said. “He doesn’t trust us. He doesn’t like us.”
“How do you know that? Why wouldn’t he?”
“Because he thinks we’re friends of Happy Blackmore.”
“Good point,” said Crabtree. “Hurry it up.”
I stepped quickly over to the Galaxie and peered in through the rear window, shielding my eyes with the flat of my hand. The jacket had slipped down onto the floor behind the driver’s seat, but I could see that it was still folded fairly neatly and apparently unharmed. I got the door unlocked, grabbed the jacket, and tucked it under my arm. Then I climbed across the front seat and reached for the glove compartment. I felt a thrill of despair in my belly. There was no way the little bagful of Humboldt County would still be there. When I popped the lid, I knew, I would find only a deranged assortment of Mexican road maps and a race card from Charles Town marked with the names of Happy Blackmore’s unlucky picks.
The reefer was still there. The glove compartment, I supposed, was as serviceable a stash for Pea Walker as it had been for me. I slid back out of the car, triumphant, and in my exultation jammed the rolled Baggie into the hip pocket of my sport jacket with a little too much zeal. My hand passed clear through the pocket, deep into the lining of the jacket itself “Shit,” I said, feeling a little stab of panic at the sound of tearing silk, and that was when it hit me that Crabtree didn’t plan to publish Wonder Boys at all. He was just going to write me off as a loss. The air seemed suddenly to have gone out of my lungs, my heart stopped beating, the sky was empty of birds and the wind died and I had ruined the pocket of my favorite corduroy jacket. Then I breathed in; a pigeon sailed overhead, and the wind sent a ghostly tent of newspaper scraping across the empty parking lot. I looked back at the Le Car and saw Crabtree watching me go about my thieving business, tapping on the accelerator every few seconds, a look of mild concern on his face.
Without stopping to think about it, I climbed back into the Galaxie and took my accustomed place behind the wheel. I had the keys to this car: at the moment it seemed to me that I didn’t have very much else. The thing to do, I considered, was to back it out of the parking lot, take off down that long alley toward Smithfield Street, cross the Monongahela, and drive away from Pittsburgh at whatever speed that ancient Michigander engine could attain. There was nowhere on earth I wanted to drive it, but that was not the same thing as having a good reason to stay. I settled in, adjusted the rearview mirror, and slid the seat all the way back. I smelled a new but oddly familiar odor in the car, something gingery and sharp that at once made me feel less wildly numb and filled my chest with a faint welcome throb of regret. It was the smell of Lucky Tiger; Irving Warshaw and Peterson Walker wore the same brand of cologne. I smiled and slipped the keys into the ignition, but then I hesitated. Before I went anywhere, I would finally see myself rid of the things I’d been dragging around behind me all weekend like a ribbon of ringing tin cans.
“What are you doing, man?” said Crabtree as I climbed out of the car again. “I think I hear someone.”
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