Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [58]
I had no idea what he was talking about. You would have thought he’d seen through the steel of my trunk to the body of Doctor Dee lying within.
“Uh huh,” I said, closing the door. “Whatever.”
I went back into the living room and looked at James. There was a sudden swell of accordion music in a distant part of the house, and then, in the next instant, a sharp series of hacks and expostulations as Crabtree coughed his way through the first cigarette of the morning. I had a sudden image of Irv Warshaw, standing by the telephone in the downstairs hall of the farmhouse, scrolling hopelessly through the functions of his watch, and I was seized with a powerful longing to put my arms around him, to brush his rough cheek against mine, to sit down to eat the bread of affliction with him and with Emily and all of the Warshaws. They weren’t my family and it wasn’t my holiday, but I was orphaned and an atheist and I would take what I could get.
“What do we do now?” said James.
The telephone sounded its mad alarm, and I limped slowly out to meet it.
“It’s me,” said Sara. “Oh, Grady, I’m so glad you’re there. So many bad things are happening at once.”
“Could you just hold on a minute, honey?” I said, before I hung up the phone. I walked back into my office, and switched off the television.
“How about we get the fuck out of here?” I said.
I LOANED JAMES LEER a flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans, and pulled on my crusty old back-country boots. I dug my fisherman’s vest out of the back of my closet. There was a stained little twist of weed in one of its nine pockets, which I gratefully consumed. Then I packed a canvas shopping bag with a thermos full of coffee, a bottle of Coke, a box of raisins, four hard-boiled eggs, a green banana, and half a pepperoni pizza, wrapped in foil, that I unearthed at the back of the refrigerator. For good measure I threw in a package of wieners, I suppose in case our journey included campfires, ajar of hot salad peppers, and a pickle spear wrapped in waxed paper left over from some long-ago bag lunch of Emily’s. I filled the pockets of my vest with pens, rolling papers, a cigarette lighter, a ruled notebook, a Swiss Army knife, AAA maps of Idaho and Mexico, and several other potentially useful items that I found in the drawer by the kitchen telephone. I grabbed an old Navajo blanket and a flashlight from the closet in the hall. I had slipped into that familiar marijuana state which lies between happiness and utter panic, and my heart was pounding. I felt as if James and I were setting out together to fish for steelhead in a flashing Idaho stream, and at the same time that we were lighting out for Tampico with a ten-minute head start on the police.
“See you,” I called out, as I abandoned my troubled house to its inmates.
It had been raining, it seemed, since February, but on this erev pesach the sun was shining. The sky was so blue that it pealed in my ears like a bell. Steam rose from the lawn and from the long black flower beds that lined the front walk. There were swollen pink buds on the camellia bushes, beaded with rain, and I thought I smelled an early hint of the mysterious bittersweet gas that fills Pittsburgh in the summertime, a smell at once industrial and aboriginal, river water and sulfur dioxide, burning tires and the coat of a fox. I put my hand on the Swiss Army knife in my pocket and looked out at the morning with a caffeine quiver of hope in my spine and at the tips of my fingers. Then we went down the walk to the driveway, and I saw a kind of crater in the hood of my car, a lopsided asterisk of wrinkles and pleats. Poor thing.
“How did that happen?” said James, running a fingertip along the jagged lip of the wound. A long flake of paint peeled away and curled around his finger like a scrap of green ribbon. “Oops.”
“Shit,” I said. “I don’t believe it.” It had completely slipped my mind. I closed my eyes. A shadow danced in a rainy smear of light, then