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By Root 377 0

in Crabtree’s hypothetical autobiography entitled “People Who Have Shot at Me,” and now as he drove us out to the college he painstakingly revised it, commencing with an episode that had befallen both of us some eleven years earlier, when I’d helped him try to sneak his lover at the time, the painter Stanley Feld, into the East Hampton home of an art-collecting lawyer who’d reneged on a promise to let Feld visit the painting he considered his best work; like all our greatest escapades this was a noble enterprise in theory rendered hopelessly foolish from the first moments of execution, in this case by Feld’s having neglected to mention that the collector in question was an art-loving Mafia lawyer, and that not only his collection but his entire walled estate was guarded by heavily armed half-men whose aim, fortunately, was less than perfect. From this incident, in which a round of automatic weapons fire tore the branch off a spruce tree several feet over our heads, Crabtree made the natural transition to the two angry shots fired at him, six months later, by Stanley Feld, one of which lodged in his left buttock.

Now he had a new section to add to this favorite hypothetical chapter, and I could see that he was delighted to do the work.

“Chaos,” he said, rolling his window down, breathing it in like the smell of cut grass or the ocean. He shook his head admiringly. “What a mess.”

“No kidding,” I said, looking down at the pathetic remnant of Wonder Boys in my lap. I ought to have been pounding on the dashboard, I thought, and eulogizing sweet chaos, the opposite and the inhibitor of death, and stating, for the record, that Vernon Hardapple’s breath had carried an anise whiff of Italian sausage and a rusty tang of beer. Ever since the day, nearly twenty-five years before, that I’d first fallen under the spell of Jack Kerouac and his free-form Arthurian hobo jazz, with all its dangerous softheartedness and poor punctuation, I had always, consciously and by some unthinking reflex of my heart, taken it as an article of faith that escapades like the rescue of James Leer from his Sewickley Heights dungeon, or the retrieval of the missing jacket, were intrinsically good: good for the production of literature, good for barroom conversation, good for the soul. Chaos! I ought to have been gulping it down the way Knut Hamsun, perched atop a locomotive as it hurtled across the American heartland, swallowed a thousand miles of icy air in a successful attempt to rid his body of tubercles. I ought to have been welcoming the bright angel of disorder into my life like the prickling flow of blood into a limb that had fallen asleep.

Instead, I spent the whole trip out to the college trying to assess and come to grips with the fatal blow that had been dealt to the manuscript of Wonder Boys. Crabtree, as it turned out, had managed to prevent exactly seven pages from blowing out of the car. They were all impressed with the watermark of his Vibram soles, or pebbled like the surface of a basketball with a relief of asphalt; part of one page had been torn away. Two thousand six hundred and four pages—seven years of my life!—abandoned in the alley behind Kravnik’s Sporting Goods, with a run-down Ford and three quarters of a dead snake. I shuffled through the remains, numb, wondering, a busted shareholder in the aftermath of a crash, clutching the sheaf of ink and rag paper that only an hour before had been all my fortune. It was a completely random sample from the novel, pages bearing no relation to one another except for two which coincidentally both dealt with the birthmark on Helena Wonder’s behind that was shaped like her native state of Indiana. I allowed my head to fall backward against the headrest. I closed my eyes.

“Seven pages,” I said. “Six and a half.”

“Naturally you have copies,” said Crabtree.

I didn’t say anything.

“Tripp?”

“I have earlier drafts,” I said. “I have alternate versions.”

“You’ll be all right, then,” he said.

“Sure, I will. It’ll probably come out better next time.”

“That’s what they say,” he said. “Look at Carlyle,