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By Root 416 0

not James’s knapsack but what I believed for a heart-stopping instant to be the mangled body of a bird, lying dead on the orange carpet. It turned out to be my wallet. My charge plates and several of the engraved business cards Sara had ordered for me on my last birthday were scattered across the floor around the table. I gathered them up and slipped them back into the wallet, a fat black kidskin number Emily’s parents had brought back for me from their trip to Italy, cut wide to hold continental bills. I returned it to the breast pocket of my jacket, not even bothering to check if all the cash was still there, as if I’d left my elegant Florentine wallet lying on the floor on purpose, where I knew it would be perfectly safe. In any case I couldn’t have said how much cash there ought to have been. I started for the door, feeling perversely pleased, congratulating myself, as I always did at such moments, on not having been born an unlucky drunk. I tapped the comforting bulk of the wallet at my breast.

“See, now,” I told Vernon, passing by the booth in which he’d taken up residence. “You just have to learn to be lucky like me.”

Then I rolled on out of the Hat. My car and Hannah’s were idling side by side at the center of the nearly empty parking lot, trailing long plumes of exhaust, their windows misted over. There were two dark shapes sitting in the front seat of my car, the smaller one, on the passenger’s side, pitched a little to the right. For some reason it irritated me that Crabtree had gotten behind the wheel of Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie. I walked over to Hannah’s car and knocked on her window, and then the air around me was filled, an inch at a time, with the radiance of her face and with the wheezing of a tragic accordion. Hannah Green was big on tango music.

“No knacksap,” I said. “He must have left it back at Thaw.”

“Are you sure?” she said. “Maybe someone took it.”

“No. Nobody took it.”

“How do you know?”

I shrugged, and bent down to have a look at James. He’d slumped over against Hannah, now, and his head rested on her shoulder with an enviable snugness.

“Is he all right?” I said.

“I think so.” She gave the hair over his ear a few unconscious strokes. “I’m just going to get him home and onto the sofa.” She ducked her head and looked at me pleadingly. “The one in your office, all right?”

“In my office?”

“Yeah, you know it’s the best one for naps, Grady.” Over the course of the previous winter, as I read student writing or caught up on correspondence at my desk, Hannah had dozed off many times while studying on my old Sears Honor Bilt, her boot heels kicked up on the creaking armrest, her face sheltered under the tent of a sociology text.

“I don’t think it’s really going to make all that much difference to him right now, Hannah,” I said. “We could probably stand him up out in the garage with the snow shovels.”

“Grady.”

“All right. In my office.” I hung a couple of fingers over the edge of her window, and she reached up and took them in her own.

“See you at home” I said.

I walked around to the front of the Galaxie and waited for Crabtree to get out. The door swung open. Crabtree looked up at me, his face utterly blank.

“You shouldn’t drive,” he said.

“You should? I said. “Get in back.”

He continued to favor me with the polar expanse of his gaze for another moment, then shrugged, got out of the car, and climbed into the back. I slid in beside Q. and put the engine in gear. As I followed Hannah down the bumpy alley I was aware of a flickering shadow at the limit of my peripheral vision. The next moment there was something caught in my headlights, flagging us down with its wild dark arms. I braked. The arms cutting across the beams of light threw thirty-foot shadows against the screen of rainy air behind them.

“Jesus Christ,” said Q., in a strangled whisper, “It’s him.”

“What’s he want?” said Crabtree. It was only Vernon Hardapple again, but Q. seemed to be seeing someone else.

“Nothing,” I said. “I had a little problem with the guy when I went back inside the Hat.”

“Go around him, Grady.”

“All