Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [48]
“Oh my God,” said Q., squeezing his head between his hands, as though to shore it up against collapse.
“Grady, go around him!”
“All right!” I tried to tiptoe the car around him, but the alleyway was too narrow. One sidestep and he was standing in front of the car again. “Shit, man, there’s no room.” “Look at those pink scars on his cheek,” said Q., remembering himself. “It looks like he has another set of lips.”
“Back up, then, idiot!” said Crabtree.
“All right!” I said, throwing the car into reverse. I rolled us back into the Hi-Hat’s parking lot, then wrenched the wheel around to the left and, ignoring a one-way sign, started off down the alley in the other direction. Vernon was there, a funny, almost happy little smile on his face. I stepped on the brake again.
“Shit,” I said, just before he rocked back onto his heels, swung his arms forward, backward, forward again. You could see him moving his mouth as he one, two, threw himself onto the hood of my car. He landed on his ass, with a surprisingly gentle report, and then quickly slid down the hood of my car to the grille, legs extended, like a child sliding down a banister. He managed to alight on his feet, turned around, took a deep bow from which he almost didn’t recover, and aimed another blind smile through the windshield, directly at me. Then he disappeared.
“Who was that?” said Q., grinning with some odd but not unfamiliar combination of terror and delight. “What happened?”
“I had my car jumped on,” I said, as though this were a service the Hat provided to its very best customers.
“Is it all right?”
I hoisted myself up on the steering wheel and tried to see how the hood looked. The light in the alleyway was bad and I couldn’t see much of anything.
“I think it’s okay I said. “They made these things pretty heavy back then.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Crabtree. “Before he comes back with some friends.”
I took off down the alley, out onto the empty avenue, then headed down Baum Boulevard, feeling once again that I’d made a narrow but foreordained escape from danger.
“After we drop Q., here, Crabtree,” I said, “we have to make a stop at Thaw.”
“Uh huh,” said Crabtree. Now that the crisis was over, he settled back down into his sulk.
“I think James might’ve left his knapsack in the auditorium.”
“Great.”
“Do you remember seeing it when you, uh, escorted him out tonight?” I looked at him in the rearview mirror, and I didn’t like what I saw. Crabtree was sitting back, arms folded behind his head, watching dark storefronts and deserted filling stations slide past him, an expression on his face of dumb amusement, as though he were the happiest man in the world, and all that he saw around him only increased the value and hue of his contentment. It was the closest that he ever came to screaming. “Crabtree?”
“Tripp?”
“Yes, Crabtree?”
“Please go fuck yourself.”
“I’ll do that,” I said.
“Isn’t this the way back to the college?” said Q. as we passed the Electric Banana.
“That’s right,” I said, impressed that he could recognize the route in the dark, drunk, after having seen it only once before.
“Well, I don’t know if—that is, I’m not staying at the college, Grady.”
“No?”
“No, I’m staying with the Gaskells.”
“Is that so?” For an instant the sole of my foot slipped free from the gas pedal, and the car drifted for a few hundred feet on momentum, slowing almost to a stop. “Well, it’s the way to their house, too,” I said, after I could breathe again. I replaced my foot on the accelerator and drove us out to Point Breeze.
“I wonder what happened to them, anyway?” Q. said when I headed down the street that led to the Gaskells’ driveway. The nearer we came to Sara’s house the less inclined I felt to go forward. We crept along the fence of fearsome iron spikes. “They just never showed up.”
In the end there was nothing more I could do to prevent it, and we turned into the Gaskells’ gravel drive. Sara and Walter garaged their cars at night, and the driveway looked desolate, the house abandoned. A pair of floods set amid the bushes on either side