Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [141]
“Boy,” I said, “would I like to have me one of those.” The man caught the irony in my tone but misunderstood it. He looked at me, then jerked a thumb in the direction of the baby that must not have been his. His lips made a tight little smile.
“I got news for you, buddy,” he said. “You already do.”
SOMEWHAT MORE THAN half an hour later, I turned into the leafy street at the heart of Point Breeze where in vanished days the heirs to great fortunes in steel and condiments had disported in the grass, knocking balls through silver wickets with gold mallets. I walked down to the Gaskells’ house along the sinister iron fence. It was a cool spring evening in a river town at the foot of the mountains. A fine mist hung in the air. All the lights in the street looked haloed and soft, as if rubbed up by the thumb of a sentimental pastelist. I was still carrying the tuba, for no reason other than that, in my current circumstances, it passed for good company. That’s another way of saying it was all I had. The Gaskells’ house was lit from every window, and as I came up the walk I heard the suave tinkling of a vibraphone. I didn’t hear any raised voices or other sounds of human merrymaking, but this didn’t surprise me, because the last party of the WordFest weekend, wherever it was held, was generally a survivors’ ball, low-key and hungover and poorly attended. I set the tuba down beside me and rang the doorbell.
I waited. All the leaves in the trees began to clatter and shake. Two seconds later it was pouring down rain. I knocked. I tried the heavy latch with my thumb, and it gave. I pushed through the door, feeling a sharp thrill of dread.
“Hello?” I said.
The place was deserted. I circled the ground floor from the living room, into the kitchen, and through the swinging saloon doors into the dining room. Everywhere I saw the signs of recent habitation: plastic cups kissed by women, cigarette butts in ashtrays, abandoned hats and sweatshirts, even an empty pair of shoes. An air of eerie, postdisaster calm hung over the whole scene, as in the wake of a death ray or sparkling toxic cloud.
“Anybody home?” I called out to the second floor, then started to follow the tentative course of my voice up the stairs. There was no reply. A drop of rain ran down the back of my neck and produced a vibraphone shiver along my spine. The front door was still open and the whispery laughter of the rain in the trees and puddles outside harmonized weirdly with the skeleton tap dance of the vibes. An empty house, a reckless and foolish man climbing to his doom, the ghostly music of an orchestra of imps and bonedaddies: I had become the hero of a story by August Van Zorn. Maybe, I thought, I had never been anything else. At this, there was a loud thump right behind me, as of a body hitting the floor, and I jumped, whirled around, prepared to be swallowed by the slavering maw of the Eldest Black Nothingness itself; but it was only the tuba. It had fallen over sideways onto the porch—either that, or it was attempting to locomote.
“I can’t turn my back on you for a second,” I told it, not quite not joking.
I backed quickly down the stairs and stood very still in the foyer, keeping an eye on the tuba and trying to think what could have happened, and where everyone had gone. I had a view down the hallway into the kitchen, and I could see through the back windows that there was a light burning out in the yard. So I went into the kitchen again and pressed my face against the glass. Inside Sara’s greenhouse one of the cool violet GroLites was aglow. There was no reason not to suppose that she must sometimes leave a light burning out there, and it was hard to believe she would have chosen this moment to see how her sweet peas were coming along.