Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [127]
“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