Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [46]
I hung up the phone, gave Hannah a sloppy and inarticulate hug, and apologized to her about forty-seven times, until neither of us knew what I was talking about and she said that it was all right. Then I hurried over to the table in the corner, where I laid my cold fingers against James Leer’s feverish neck.
“In ten seconds,” I told them, as I helped James to his feet, “this dance floor is going to be packed.”
HANNAH SAID THAT she had never been there but she believed James Leer rented a room from his Aunt Rachel, in the attic of her house in Mt. Lebanon. Since neither of us felt like driving all way the out to the South Hills at two o’clock in the morning, I folded James into Hannah’s beat-to-shit Le Car and sent them on home to my house. Crabtree and Q. would be riding with me. I figured it would be safer that way for all of us.
As I was about to close the door on him, James stirred and wrinkled up his face.
“He’s having a bad dream,” I said.
We watched him for a moment.
“I’ll bet James’s bad dreams are really bad,” said Hannah. “The way bad movies are.”
“Xylophones on the soundtrack,” I said. “Lots of Mexican policemen.”
James lifted a hand to the general vicinity of his right shoulder and patted it a few times, without opening his eyes, then pawed in the same way at his left shoulder, as if he thought he were home in bed and had lost track of his pillow.
“My knacksap;” he said, as his eyes flew open.
“His bag,” said Hannah. “You know that ratty green thing of his?”
James sent his pale hand spidering across his lap, his seat, the space around his long legs, then made a sudden grab for the door handle.
“You stay right here, little James,” I said, squeezing him back into the car. I waved to Crabtree, busy just then propping Q.’s string-puppet body against the side of my car, and called out that I was going to run in and look for James’s knapsack. Crabtree didn’t bother to look up. Before I could register the fact that he was ignoring me, however, I’d already tossed him my keys. They rang out against his left shoulder and then splashed into a puddle at his feet. He fired a nasty look at me across the parking lot before he knelt down to retrieve them, one restraining hand on Q.’s waist.
“Sorry,” I said.
As I limped back into the Hat and headed for our corner, the man we had fictionalized as Vernon Hardapple tried, without much success, to interpose his body between me and our table. His breath blew sour and warm at my face. His tall tsunami of hair had disintegrated into a kind of shivering pom-pom that stuck out all around his head. He was ready to mix it up with me.
“What were you looking at?” he asked me. His voice was raspy and his speech slow. Standing close to him I could see that his facial scars were the mark of some jagged and not very sharp object. “Something funny about me?”
“I wasn’t looking at you,” I said, smiling.
“Whose car you driving?”
“What’s that?”
“That 1966 emerald green Ford Galaxie 500, out there, with the license plate that say YAW 332. That your car?”
I said that it was.
“Bullshit,” he said, pushing lightly at my chest. “That’s mine, motherfucker.”
“I’ve had it for years.”
“Bullshit.” He brought his scarred face an inch closer to mine.
“It was my mother’s,” I said. Ordinarily I’m never too busy to get myself into a stupid argument with an angry and potentially dangerous person in an unsavory place. I was in a hurry to get James home and safely put to bed, however, and so I just brushed past him. “Excuse me.”
He lurched in front of me.
“What were you fuckers looking at?”
“We were admiring your hair,” I said.
He reached out for my chest as if to give me a shove. I took an involuntary step backward, and he stumbled against me. As he tried to regain his feet he tipped himself over sideways, and sprawled across the black Naugahyde seat of an empty booth behind him, which after a moment he found comfortable and appeared unwilling to leave.
“Sorry about your brother, Vernon,” I said.
Our table hadn’t been cleared yet. As I came closer I saw, underneath it,