Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [39]
“ ’me see?” Tony held out his hand. “My brothers all have, like, fucking gun collections, if you can believe it.” I handed it over to him. Shadow watched it pass between us with mild interest, holding, as a dog will, to the imperishable belief that anything might possibly be something edible. “Pearl-handled. A twenty-two. This kind only holds one shot, I think.”
I glanced up to the porch, but the old man appeared to have given up on his inconstant son and gone back inside, turning out the porch light behind him. All the other lights in the house seemed also to have gone out. I thought I could see now why Miss Sloviak had been less than eager all evening to come home. Tony looked up from the pistol in his fingers and shook his head.
“Figures,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, because this is the kind of a gun that, you know, like, Bette Davis would carry? In her beaded purse?” He grinned. “I bet that kid would be much happier if he could be Bette Davis shooting herself, instead of some big-lipped little boy in a stinky old overcoat.”
Tony closed his fingers around the gun, and his lids with their long eyelashes fluttered twice and then closed. He brought the pistol delicately to his lips. Though I knew the gun was empty now, I was frightened at the sight of that. For the first time it registered in my weedy old brain that James Leer, my student, had intended to kill himself that evening.
“I’d better go,” I said. “I think I need to rescue James Leer.”
Tony lowered the pistol and started to give it back to me. I pushed his hand away.
“Keep it. I think it suits you.”
“Thanks.” He looked up at the dark, shuttered face of the house and frowned. “I just might need it myself.”
“Ha,” I said, fumbling in my jacket pocket for my car keys. I knew I’d been holding them a second or two before.
“Hey, you know, uh, Grady, maybe I’d just go on home if I were you,” said Tony, as I got back into my car. “You look to me like you need to rescue yourself.”
“That’s not a bad idea.” I closed my eyes. I saw myself pulling into the driveway of our ivy-clad house on Denniston Street, hanging my coat on the newel post of our stairs, falling down backward into the fragrant riot of coverlets and bedclothes on our never-made bed. Then I remembered that there was nothing, no one, waiting for me at home. Without really wanting to, I opened my eyes and nodded once to Tony. I started to roll up my window, then stopped. “Oh, shit, buddy,” I said. “What about that fucking tuba?”
“Keep it,” said Tony. He reached out and slapped me three times softly on the cheek, as you might pat the tremulous cheek of a baby. “It suits you.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said, and rolled up the window. As I pulled away from the curb, heading back up Juniper Street, I watched in the rearview mirror as Tony Sloviak, carrying his bags, climbed the long stairway up to his father’s house, past the benedictory embrace of Our Lady, his little black dog nipping at his heels with every step he took.
CRABTREE AND I HAD discovered the Hi-Hat together, in the course of one of his first visits to Pittsburgh, during the period between my second and third marriages—the last great era of our friendship, of our pirate days, before stars were lost from certain constellations, when the woods and railroad wastes and dark street corners of the world still concealed Indians and poetical madmen and razor-sharp women with the eyes of tarot-card queens. I was still a monstrous thing then, a Yeti, a Swamp Thing, the chest-thumping Sasquatch of American fiction. I wore my hair long and tipped the scales at an ungraceful but dirigible two hundred and thirty-five pounds. I exercised my appetites freely, with a young man’s wild discipline. I moved my big frame across the floors of barrooms like a Cuban dancer with a knife in his boot and a hibiscus in the band of his Panama hat.
We found Carl Franklin’s Hi-Hat, or the Hat, as it was known to regulars, on the Hill, stranded in a forlorn block of Centre Avenue between the boarded-up