Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [28]
“Wow,” I said. “I wish I could have seen that.”
Then we carried Doctor Dee down the stairs and along the endless driveway to the street, where we laid him out in the back of my car, on the seat, beside the tuba.
BY THE TIME WE arrived for the lecture, both of the school’s main lots were full, and we ended up parking in one of the quiet residential streets at the other end of campus from Thaw Hall, under an old stand of beech trees, at the foot of some happy professor’s driveway. I cut the engine and we sat for a moment, listening to the rain drop like beechnuts from the trees and scatter across the canvas top of the car.
“That sounds nice,” said James Leer. “It’s like being in a tent.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said, filled with a sudden longing to be lying on my back in a little tent, peering up through the silk mesh window at Orion.
“You don’t have to. It’s dumb for you to tell her you did it, Professor Tripp. I mean, it’s a lie.” He picked at the threads fraying along the hem of his long black coat. “I don’t care what she does to me, to tell you the truth. She probably should kick me out.”
“James,” I said, shaking my head. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have sneaked you up there in the first place.”
“But,” said James, looking confused, “you knew the combination.”
“True,” I said. “Think about that one for a minute or two.” I looked at my watch. “Only you can’t, ’cause we’re late.” I grabbed hold of the handle and leaned against the door. “Come on, help me get him into the trunk.”
“The trunk?”
“Yeah, well, I’m probably going to have to drive a bunch of people over to the Hi-Hat after the lecture, buddy. There isn’t going to be a whole lot of room for people with a tuba and a dead dog in the backseat.”
I climbed out of the car and tilted my seat forward. My fingers were cold and I could feel a very faint envelope of heat around the body of Doctor Dee as I passed my arms beneath it. I lifted without crouching first to gain leverage, and felt a sharp twinge in the small of my back. There was a vinegar tang of blood in my nose. James had gotten out of the car by now, and he came around to help me pitch the stiffening old pup into the trunk, alongside Miss Sloviak’s bags. We slid the body as far back as we could, under the rear dash, until there was a sound like a pencil snapping in two, and we jerked our hands away.
“Yuck,” said James, wiping his hands against the flaps of his overcoat. That garment bore the stains of all manner of hell, bad weather, and misfortune, but I wondered if it had ever before been used to wipe away the invisible effluvium of a dead dog. Quite possibly so, I imagined.
“Now the tuba,” I said.
“That’s a big trunk,” James said, as we jammed in the leathery old case that looked so much like the black heart of some leviathan. “It fits a tuba, three suitcases, a dead dog, and a garment bag almost perfectly.”
“That’s just what they used to say in the ads,” I said, reaching for Crabtree’s garment bag. I palpated its pockets for a moment, then zipped open the largest of them. To my surprise I found that it was empty. I felt around in the next largest pocket, and then in a third, and found that they were empty, too. Laying the bag open across the other luggage, I unzipped its main compartment. Inside there were a pair of white dress shirts, a couple of paisley neckties, and two suits, glinting faintly in the streetlight.
“They’re the same,” said James, lifting the uppermost suit and peering underneath.
“What’s that?”
“His suits. They look just like the one he has on now.”
He was right: the suits were both double-breasted, with peaked lapels, cut from the same kind of sleek metallic silk. Although it was difficult to tell their color, you could see that they matched each other and the suit he was wearing. I thought of Superman’s closet at the North Pole, a row of shining suits hanging on vibranium hooks.
“I find that odd,” I said, finding it somehow pathetic. I’d always thought there was something a little pathetic about Superman, too, way up there in his Fortress of Solitude.