Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [41]
Out on the floor there were a handful of couples doing the buckethead and the barracuda and the cold Samoan, to the weary and inexorable groove of “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” and near the center of the crowd of dancers were Hannah Green and Q., the man who haunted his own life. Hannah was an ungraceful but energetic dancer, capable of admirable feats of pelvic abandon, but the best you could say for old Q. was that he was making no effort to cling to some outmoded notion of dignity. It sounds uncharitable of me to say so, I know, but his attention seemed to be occupied less by his own movements than by the slow vertical mambo of Hannah Green’s breasts. I waved to Hannah, who smiled at me, and when I looked around and gave my shoulders an exaggerated shrug, she pointed to a table in a far corner, away from the dancers, the bandstand, and all the other customers. At this table sat Crabtree and James Leer, behind a long, crazy skyline of Iron City bottles. James was slouched down in his chair, his head tilted against the wall, his eyes closed. He looked almost as if he might be asleep. As for Crabtree, he was staring off at, or past, the people dancing, with an expression of happy concentration. His arm was extended down and away from his body, at a delicate angle, as though he were about to choose a bonbon from a tray. His hand, however, wasn’t in evidence; it had disappeared under the table, in the general vicinity of James Leer’s lap. I shot what must’ve been a fairly panicked look at Hannah, who bared her teeth and screwed up her eyes, the way you do when an ambulance goes screaming by.
I stopped a waitress on my way over to the table and asked her to bring me a shot of George Dickel. By the time I got there, Crabtree’s hands were both visible, and James was sitting more or less upright, his cheeks flushed. The high, flawless forehead that had led me to believe him a rich boy looked feverish, and his eyes were lustrous with something that might have been either euphoria or fear.
“How are you feeling, James?” I said.
“I’m drunk,” he said, sounding very sincere. “I’m sorry, Professor Tripp.”
I sat down beside Crabtree, glad to be off my feet. The pain in my ankle was getting worse.
“You’re all right, James,” I said, feeding him the same smile of reassurance I’d already fed him twice that day; the first time as his story was hung up for slaughter in workshop, and the second as I led him into the Gaskells’ bedroom, telling him that everything was fine. “Everything’s fine.”
“Sure it is,” said Crabtree. He handed me his bottle of beer, half full, and I tipped it back and took a long warm swallow. “Thought we’d lost you, Tripp.”
“Where is everyone?” I said, setting the empty bottle before him with a flourish, as though I’d just performed some alcoholic parlor trick. “Did it work out to be just the four of you?”
“Nobody else showed up,” said Crabtree. “Sara and what’s his name, Walter, they said they were going to go home first and then meet us here. But I guess they just decided to stay home. Curl up on the sofa with the dog.”
I glanced at James, expecting a little guilt to show in his face, but he was too far gone for that. I doubted if he even remembered what he had done. He’d started to wink out again, his head drifting back against the wall.
“Is that just beer?” I said, jerking my head in his direction.
“Primarily,” said Crabtree. “Although I gather you two staged a little raid on the Crabtree pharmacopoeia.’
“That was a while ago,” I said, reaching down to press my fingers against the bandage on my ankle. “He shouldn’t be feeling any of that anymore.”
“Well, you two missed a few bottles the