Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [43]
“He’s a boxer,” I said. “A flyweight.”
“He’s a jockey,” said Crabtree. “His name’s, um, Curtis. Hardapple.”
“Not Curtis,” I said.
“Vernon, then. Vernon Hardapple. The scars are from a—from a horse’s hooves. He fell during a race and got trampled.”
“He’s addicted to painkillers.”
“He has a plate in his head.”
“He lost a toe to sugar diabetes.”
“He can’t piss standing up anymore.”
“He lives with his mother.”
“Right. He had a younger brother who was a—trainer.”
“A groom.”
“Named Claudell. Who was retarded. And his mother blames Vernon for his death.”
“Because, because, because Vernon let him—groom some mean stallion—and he got his head stove in. Or—”
“He was killed,” said a sleepy voice, “when a gangster named Freddie Nostrils tried to shoot his favorite horse. He took the bullet himself.”
We both turned to look at James Leer, who opened one bloodshot eye to regard us.
“Vernon, over there, was in on the hit.”
“That’s very good,” said Crabtree, after a surprised moment. We watched as the eye closed once more.
“He heard what we were saying’ I said.
Working on his sixth or seventh bottle of Iron, Crabtree did not look overly concerned by this. I took another few sips of poison from my shot glass. After a few minutes the silence between us seemed to have taken on an insufferable weight.
“Poor old Vernon Hardapple,” Crabtree said, sorrowfully shaking his head. He smiled. “They always come out sounding so unlucky.”
“Every story is the story of somebody’s hard luck,” I said, quoting the silver-haired cowboy writer in whose class we had met twenty years before.
“Hey, teach,” said Hannah Green, bounding toward us in her sharp red boots. “I want you to come and dance with me.”
WE DANCED, TO “Shake a Tail Feather,” and “Sex Machine,” and some scratchy Joe Tex number whose title I couldn’t recall. I danced with Hannah until the band came off break, and as they climbed up onto the platform and got behind their various instruments I went back over to the table and hit up Crabtree for another codeine and a couple of whatever else he was selling. I needed something for my ankle, and something else for my sense of shame—don’t think I didn’t feel ridiculous, thrashing around out there like one of Picasso’s wounded minotaurs, lumbering blindly after an angelic young girl. Crabtree had managed to revive James Leer, for the moment, and they were engaged with old Q. in an apparently intricate consideration of the function or meaning of the cockatoo in Citizen Kane. Crabtree was by no means a film buff but he had an excellent memory for narratives and his gothic imagination found much to appreciate in the work of my girth brother Orson Welles. Or at least that was the impression he wanted to give James Leer. Under the cold and inescapable gaze of Q. or his doppelgänger, Crabtree held out to me a palmful of blue grapeshot, pink moons, gray goldfish, little white pentagons shaped like tiny home plates.
“Christ, your hand looks like a bowl of Lucky Charms,” I said. “Let me try one of those white ones.”
I washed it down with something roiling around in a shot glass on the table in front of Crabtree that stank of ketones and aldehydes and that I thought might have been bad tequila. Then I went back out onto the floor and danced for another hour to what grizzled old Carl Franklin called the R & B stylings of Pittsburgh’s very own Double Down, until I could no longer feel my ankle and had lost the better part of my shame. Hannah rolled up her sleeves, and unbuttoned the top two buttons of her flannel shirt, revealing the threadbare neckline of a white ribbed undershirt and a filigreed locket on a thin silver chain.
While she danced she kept her eyes closed and described solitary,