Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [80]
“A matador. Named Vernon Hardapple.”
“He was married to a Mexican,” I said. “He learned it down there.”
“But she left him.” James slapped one back at Philly, and the ball sailed across the basement and landed in a box of old issues of Commentary. “Love–ten. And I guess he got a little careless in the ring.”
I couldn’t keep myself from smiling, but James’s face remained perfectly straight, and his eyes were focused on the Ping-Pong ball.
“He got bored?” said Philly.
“Just knocked over,” I said, “Broke his hip. End of his career.”
“So now he fights cars in the Hi-Hat parking lot,” said James. “Your serve.”
“The old Hi-Hat,” said Philly, spinning his first serve across the net, off the table, and then skittering around the rim of James’s glass. It just missed falling in. Philly Warshaw was death at Beer Pong. “Eleven-zip. Still going there?”
“Now and then.” All of a sudden I felt a little uneasy. There was something about the incident with Vernon at the Hi-Hat last night that troubled me. Why had he said the car belonged to him, quoting the letters of its license plate, eulogizing as emerald green what I’d always thought of as an unsightly shade of fly butt? I supposed, on reflection, that the car could very well have been his; Happy Blackmore had claimed to have won it in a poker game, but I’d always found this a little hard to believe, given the cosmic extent of the losing streak that Happy’d been on. I’d waited a week for him to bring the certificate of title around before learning through a colleague of his at the Post-Gazette that he was down in the Catoctin Mountains playing out the last foot of thread on his bobbin. “That dude with the big arms still standing there at the door? Cleon? Clement?”
“He’s still there.”
“That guy has twenty-two-inch biceps,” he said. “I measured them one time.”
“Clement let you measure his biceps?”
Philly shrugged. “I won a bet with him,” he said. He glanced quickly over toward me, then blew another shot past James. “So, Grady, I hear—twelve-zip—I hear you brought us a very special kind of parsley for our Passover dipping tonight.”
“Uh huh,” I said, looking at James, who blushed. I imagined that he’d felt flattered by Philly’s attentions; no doubt before I showed up he’d been boasting to Philly about what a big dope stud he was. “I’ve got a little bud in the car.”
“So?”
“So?” I said, folding my arms across my chest.
Philly grinned, and then cried out in mock alarm as James succeeded in spattering a lucky shot into his beer. He raised the glass and waggled his eyebrows at me over the rim.
“Oh. Sure, okay,“ I said, affecting, in classic pothead fashion, a breezy unconcern with the prospect of getting stoned. “If you want.” I was dying for a nice big fatty. I got up and started for the basement door. Philly sent his paddle clattering across the table.
“Are we stopping?” said James, distressed.
“Gotta take a leak,” said Philly, starting for the stairs. “I’ll meet you’ns outside.”
“Come with me, James,” I said, throwing open the creaking cellar doors and starting up the stairs through the cobwebs. Before I could climb out, James gave a tug on the cuff of my trousers.
“Grady,” he said. “Grady, look.” I ducked back into the basement. He grinned at me and pulled me by my sleeve over to a large, foul-smelling wooden complex of crate lumber and chicken wire that sprawled across the far corner of the basement. He pointed.
“Snake,” he said;
Inside the huge pen there was a chunk of dead elm, from which hung a long perfect strand of muscle, draped in decorous pleats, like a streamer. This was Grossman, the nine-foot boa constrictor who, to their considerable regret, had been rooming with the Warshaws for the last twelve years. Philly Warshaw had won Grossman in a Liberty Avenue pool hall during his senior year at Allderdice, then abandoned him to his parents’ care the following fall when he enlisted. Even then, Grossman was not a young snake, and his imminent death had been foretold by veterinarians,