Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [59]
“And he landed on his butt,” said James.
“That’s right,” I said. “How can you tell?”
James Leer looked at me, then back at the hood of the Galaxie. He shrugged.
“You can see the outline of a butt,” he said, and then threw his canvas knapsack into the car.
As I backed us out of the driveway, I narrowly missed destroying Happy Blackmore’s Galaxie once and for all. I’d noticed the white delivery van when we came out of the house, creeping along Denniston as its driver read addresses off the housefronts, but I hadn’t bothered to look for it again before I went barreling down the driveway, doing at least twenty; you had to go fast when the car was in reverse, or she had a tendency to stall out. At the last possible instant I saw the flash of white in my rearview mirror, a pair of airbrushed punching prizefighters, SDOOG GNITROPS S’KINVARK. I hit the brakes. The driver of the van floored it and pulled wildly away.
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m off to a good start.”
“Why don’t you put the top down?” James suggested. “Maybe that’ll make it easier to see.”
I blushed, and reached up to unlatch the roof.
“I keep forgetting I can do this,” I said.
On the way out of town we stopped at the Giant Eagle on Murray, and James, having turned up his nose at my stock of provisions, picked up sixty-four ounces of orange juice, a package of powdered industrial doughnuts, and a copy of Entertainment Weekly. It featured an article on the Fonda family of actors and there was a large photograph of handsome Henry on the cover, in a scene taken from what James at once identified as Drums Along the Mohawk.
“God,” he pronounced, solemnly, holding out the magazine for me to see.
“He was all right,” I said.
I picked up a dozen red roses in the flower department, and wrapped the stems carefully in wet paper towels from the bathroom so that they wouldn’t die on the way. There was a condom machine bolted to the wall of the men’s room, and I dropped fifty cents on something called a Luv-O-Pus that promised to entangle my partner in undulating tentacles of pleasure. We got stuck in a long checkout line and to pass the time I was going to show James Leer the Luv-O-Pus, but at the last minute I decided against it; I had a feeling that such an article might frighten him. While we waited to pay he downed the entire bottle of orange juice. He worked his pointy little Adam’s apple up and down.
“I’m so thirsty,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me.”
I laughed. “Shit, James, you’re hungover.”
He considered this a moment, then nodded.
“It feels kind of sad,” he said.
As we drove out Bigelow I kept my eyes off the ruined hood of Happy’s car and tried to put the damage, and all that it seemed to say about the way I was conducting my life, out of my mind. The top was down and I listened to the hiss of the wheels against the street, the flow of wind over the car, the sound of Stan Getz blowing faintly from the speakers and trailing out into the air behind us like a pearly strand of bubbles from a pipe. It was no use. The outline of a butt rode forever out before me, like an identifying badge.
“I thought we were going to talk to the Chancellor,” said James, unhopefully, as we headed farther and farther away from Point Breeze.
“We were,” I said. I looked at the flowers on the seat beside me. A gallant gesture, I thought, was the first expedient of a guilty conscience. Why did I think that Emily would be anything but sorry to see my haggard face and my odorless grocery-store roses? In any event at James’s reminder the flock of guilty feelings that wheels perpetually in the chest of every pothead alighted now on Sara’s roof. Had I actually hung up on her? Was I really leaving town with her dead dog in my trunk? “Yeah, uh, you know, maybe this isn’t such a hot idea, James. Maybe we ought to turn around.”
James didn’t say anything. He was jammed up against his door, wrapped in his stained overcoat, knees up, elbows in,