Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “I mean, look at the way they dance—it’s all about sodomy,” he was saying, charmingly.

  “Get out of here,” said Hannah, picking large fragments of eggshell out of the bowl.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Jeff,” said Crabtree, shaking his head sadly. “Jeff, we have to have a talk.”

  “Oh, hi!” said Hannah, looking up. She gave me an awkward, oddly formal wave. She had on a long purple nightshirt over her cracked red boots. Her index finger wore a smart eggshell hat. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks pink, and when she spoke she sounded well-rested and strong and a bit over-eager, like someone whose fever has just broken. “You fellas want some eggs?”

  I shook my head and then pointed toward the basement door.

  “Can I talk to you a sec, Hannah?” I said.

  “Was that you snoring, man?” I heard Jeff say to Crabtree as we started down the basement stairs. “You sound like a fucking rock tumbler.”

  “What’s up?” said Hannah, looking concerned.

  I told her that James had been taken away by the police, and that rescuing him would be a simple thing, but that in order to rescue him we would need to borrow her car. The sudden disappearance of my own vehicle I explained with a vague but suitably ominous allusion to Happy Blackmore. No, I said, shaking my head in the same vague and ominous but supremely self-possessed manner, it would be better if she herself didn’t come along. She and Jeff should just head on over to WordFest, and in an hour—easy—James, Crabtree, and I would be joining them. That was all I told her—it was all I thought I needed to tell her—but to my surprise she did not immediately agree to let us take her car. She hugged herself, stepped backward toward her bed, and sat heavily down. The manuscript of Wonder Boys stood in a stack on her night table, spotless, smooth-edged, all its corners true. Hannah regarded it for several seconds, then turned her face to me. She was biting her lower lip.

  “Grady,” she said. She took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “Are you at all stoned, by any chance?”

  I was not, and I swore to her that I was not. The claim sounded completely false to my ears. I could see she didn’t believe me, and, in the way of these things, the more I promised her, the falser I sounded.

  “Okay, okay, ease up,” she said. “It’s not really any of my business. I wouldn’t even—I mean, normally—”

  I was surprised by how upset she seemed. “What, Hannah? What is it?”

  “Sometimes I think you smoke too much of that stuff.”

  “Maybe I do,” I said. “Yeah, I do. Why? I mean, what makes you say so?”

  “It’s not— I didn’t want to—” She reached for Wonder Boys. Its weight bent her hand at the wrist, and when she dropped it onto her lap it resounded against her knee bones like a watermelon. She looked down at its first page, at the initial run of sentences I’d written and rewritten two hundred times. She shook her head and started to speak, then closed her mouth again.

  “Just say it, Hannah. Come on.”

  “It starts out great, Grady. Really great. For the first two hundred pages or so I was loving it. I mean, you heard me last night.”

  “I heard you,” I said, my heart squeezing itself into a tight fist of dread.

  “But then—I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know what?”

  “Well, then it starts—I mean parts of it are still wonderful, amazing, but after a while it just starts—I don’t know—it gets all spread out.”

  “Spread out?”

  “Okay, not spread out, then, but jammed too full. Like that thing with the Indian ruin? Okay, first you have the Indians come, right, they build the thing, they die out, it falls apart, hundreds of years go by, it gets buried, in the fifties some scientist finds it and digs it out, he kills himself—all that goes on and on and on, for, like forty pages, and, I don’t know—” She paused, and blinked her eyes, and wondered for a moment at the novelty of administering criticism to her teacher. “It doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with your characters. I mean, it’s beautiful writing, amazingly beautiful, but … And all that about the town cemetery? All the headstones, and their inscriptions, and the bones and bodies underneath them? And the part about their different guns in the cabinet in the old house? And the genealogies of their horses? And—”She caught herself devolving into simple litany and broke off.

  “Grady,” she said, sounding more than a little horror-struck. “You have whole chapters that go for thirty and forty pages with no characters at all!”

  “I know.” I knew, but it had never quite occurred to me to put it to myself this way. There were, I was suddenly certain, a lot of things about Wonder Boys that had never occurred to me. On a certain crucial level—how strange!—I had no idea of what the book was really about, and not the faintest notion of how it would strike a reader. I hung my head. “Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry, Grady, really, I just couldn’t help wondering—”

  “What?”

  “I wondered how it would be—what this book would be like—if you didn’t—if you weren’t always so stoned all the time when you write.”

  I pretended to become indignant. “It wouldn’t read half as well,” I said, sounding more dishonest to myself than ever. “I’m sure of that.”

  Hannah nodded, but she didn’t meet my eyes, and the tips of her ears turned red. She was embarrassed for me.

  “Wait till you finish it,” I said. “You’ll see.”

  Again she didn’t reply, but now she managed to bring herself to look at me, and her face was the face of a woman who, having at the last moment discovered that all of her fiancé’s claims and bona fides were false, all of his credentials forged, has unpacked her trunks and cashed in her ticket and now must tell him quickly that she will not sail away. There was pity there, and resentment, and a Daughter-of-Utah hardness that said, Enough’s enough. However far she’d gotten in her reading last night and this morning, the thought of pressing onward to the end was obviously too onerous for her even to contemplate.

  “Anyway,” I said, glancing away. I cleared my throat. It was my turn to be embarrassed. “Is it all right about the car?”

  “Of course,” she said, with cruel charity and a backward wave of her hand. “Keys are on the dresser.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem. You guys take good care of James, now.”

  “We will.” I turned away. “You betcha.”

  “Grady,” she said.

  I looked back, and she held out the manuscript to me as though returning a ring. I took it, grabbed the keys, and started back up the stairs.

  SO CRABTREE AND I undertook a final pilgrimage to the Hi-Hat, provincial capital of the empire of our friendship throughout the long period of its decline. It was the only place we could think of to go looking for the Shadow, that implacable high-haired hobgoblin we’d invented and set loose on Friday night. At his own insistence Crabtree was behind the wheel, and going too fast. He drove Hannah’s rattling old Renault like a Frenchman, upshifting and downshifting as though linked in an intimate horsemanlike, relationship to the engine. In his hands and eyes and in the cant of his thin shoulders there was a cool, expectant agitation I hadn’t seen in years. For the moment, at least, he seemed to have managed to pole his own raft out of the fog of failure, and other such bad habits, in whose midst we’d been floating now for so long. As he drove, drumming on the dash, sucking on a Kool, I could see that he was going over all the accidents, likelihoods, and possible outcomes of this expedition, considering alternate strategies and tactics. Ordinarily it would have made me glad to see him thus alive with all the narrative possibilities of our trouble. It was like old times; he was writing his name in water. But whenever we stopped for a red light he would glance over at me, and his expression would go blank, incredulous, faintly pitying, as if I were only a bedraggled hitchhiker picked up in a rainstorm on the road between Zilchburg and Palookaville: a nobody headed nowhere, smelling vaguely of wet wool. I had
the feeling that if our present venture failed I would not play a central role in his next attempt to rescue James Leer.

  I rode shotgun, watching the stolid brick houses of Pittsburgh go past, feeling stunned and useless in the wake of Hannah’s criticism, and hoping nevertheless to retrieve the Baggie of dope I’d left in the glove compartment of the Galaxie. We were halfway to the Hill before I became aware that I was still clutching the manuscript of Wonder Boys in my hands, crinkling its tide page with my fingers. No wonder I looked so pathetic to Crabtree, a broken down old illusionist carrying his moth-eaten scarves, greasy tarot cards, and amazed testimonials from defunct czars and countesses in a paper suitcase on his lap. I’d never intended to bring the thing along, and I had a feeling that it was probably a mistake to have done so; but I hadn’t intended not to bring it along, either, and although I felt embarrassed there was, as always, something reassuring about the watermelon weight of it on my thighs. Neither of us said a word.

  The storefronts along Centre Avenue were barred and shuttered, the door handles chained, the broken sidewalks deserted except for a party of girls in starchy pink and yellow and ladies in broad hats who were coming down the steps of the A.M.E. church on the corner of the Hi-Hat’s block. Crabtree guided us into the parking lot of the Hat, where on Friday night that flickering Shadow had danced its corrida with the Galaxie. It was empty of everything but a stiff breeze and a broad whirling fairy circle of paper cups, losing numbers, the want ads, a hair net, fluttering sheets of waxed paper stained with barbecue sauce. The black steel doors of the club were closed tight, a corrugated shutter covered the kitchen window, and the place had the usual forlorn appearance of a nightclub in the daytime, unplugged, unmagical, closed up like a frozen custard stand on a deserted stretch of boardwalk in the winter.

  “Oh, well,” I said.

  “Oh, well, nothing,” said Crabtree, backing out, dragging the wheel around, putting the car in first. “We’re going to—Hey.”

  I looked. At the other end of the alley, where it gave onto the next street, sat a red sports car, parked at a crazy angle and blocking our path, as though its driver had been in too great a hurry to drive it any farther and had abandoned it just so. It was one of those angular new Japanese models that bear such a disturbing resemblance to the naked skull of a rat.

  “Think that’s Carl Franklin?” said Crabtree.

  “How about if I go see,” I said.

  “There’s an idea.”

  I nodded. I set the manuscript on the seat and got out of the car. Crabtree looked at it and for a moment I thought he was going to pick it up. He left it lying there. He reached into his pocket for his cigarettes.

  “Go on,” he said, pushing in the dashboard lighter. “We don’t have all that much time.”

  I went over to the pair of black doors and one-two pounded on them. I watched a lipsticked cocktail napkin chase itself around an oblong patch of mud beside the door. Years ago there had been an evergreen hedge planted here, a survivor from swankier days at the Hi-Hat, which in the summertime bore tiny white flowers as heady as gardenias, but it had proved too attractive a target for the local Six-Inch Rifle Club, and now there was only the patch of mud. I reckoned the shade of lipstick on the napkin as Rose Sauvage. A minute passed. I looked back at the car, praying as I turned my head, He’ll be reading it. He was not. He sat blowing smoke, hands on the wheel, brow furrowed, examining me for signs of an imminent failure of nerve. I pounded on the door, harder this time, and waited, then looked back at Crabtree and shrugged. He spun his hand at the wrist several times in an impatient circle, and I started back to the Le Car. At that moment I heard the report of a heavy bolt being drawn, and the squeal of hinges, and behind the windshield of Hannah’s car Crabtree’s eyes widened. I whirled and found myself looking at a naked chest, hairless, damp, incandescent with muscle, beautiful in color as a slab of raw liver. Clement, the doorman, was not only shirtless, but the fly of his jeans was unbuttoned, revealing two inches of red silk underpants. He was not at all happy to see me.

  “Hey, Clement,” I said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “Uh huh.” The interior of the club was dark behind him but I could hear the slow exhalation of a saxophone and then the irresistible carnal reasoning of Marvin Gaye. Clement folded his twenty-two-inch biceps across his chest. The smell of pussy was on him, around him, drifting out of the gap in his trousers, the smell of cumin and salt pork and sawdust hot off the saw. “You are, though.”

  “I know, and I mean it, I’m really sorry. You know me, don’t you?” I laid a hand over my wildly beating heart. “Name’s Tripp. I used to come here a lot.”

  “I know your face.”

  “Great, okay, well, listen, I’m, uh, my friend and I are looking for someone. Little guy. Tall hair. Black. He has a big nasty scar on his face. Kind of looks like he has an extra mouth, right here.”

  I touched my fingers to my cheek. Clement’s eyes tightened at the corners for an instant, then relaxed.

  “Yeah?” he said. He raised the fingers of his left hand to his nose and idly sniffed at them. Presently it became clear that this was all he intended to say for the moment.

  “So do you know him?”

  “’Fraid not.”

  “Really? I bet he comes here all the time? He’s just a little guy. Looks like a jockey.” His name’s Vernon, I almost added.

  Clement took a step backward, and with an expression on his face of profoundest mock regret, started to shut the door.

  “We’re closed, Gee,” he said.

  “Wait!” I reached out and grabbed hold of the door with both hands. I did it without thinking and my intentions were largely symbolic, but I soon found myself pulling with all the strength in my arms. I didn’t want that door to close on me. “Buddy—!”

  Clement smiled, flashing a gold incisor, and let go of the door. I flew backward, clinging like a windsurfer to my steely black sail before I lost my footing and sat down, hard, in the patch of mud by the door. The sound of my impact was impressive but not especially dignified. Clement took a step toward me and stood looking down, hands on his hips. He breathed carefully, like a runner pacing himself. I figured I had about two seconds to tell him something good. I offered him all the money in my wallet and whatever was in Crabtree’s, too. He refused it. The golden tooth winked at me. Clement was the kind of man who smiled only when he was angry. I made him a second offer, and this time he held out his hand to me and helped me to my feet. I looked back at the patch of mud, in which I had impressed my unique personal cartouche. Then I hobbled over to the car, peeling the seat of my jeans away from my skin.

  Crabtree had rolled down the window. His eyebrows were arched and he was smirking his Crabtree smirk but there was something unamused in the expression of his eyes.

  “Well,” I said, leaning against the door. “Well?”

  I swallowed and looked away. I wiped my muddy fingers against one thigh. I told him what I had promised Clement in exchange for the Shadow’s name.

  “No way,” he said, but without hesitating he reached into the breast pocket of his linen jacket and pressed a slender plastic prescription vial into my hand. “So he knows him, huh? Who is he?”

  “That’s what I’m about to find out.”

  “Peterson Walker,” said Clement, slipping the vial carelessly into the back pocket of his jeans. “People call him Pea. He used to fight.”

  That figured; Happy Blackmore drew a fair portion of his unsavory acquaintance from the eye cutters and ring rats of the upper Ohio valley.

  “A flyweight,” I guessed.

  He shrugged. “More like a fleaweight,” he said. “He works for a sporting-goods store. I forget the name. Downtown, Second, Third Avenue. Something with a K.”

  “Is it open on Sundays?”

  “Man, what I look like? The fucking Yellow Pages?”

  “Sorry,” I said. I turned to leave him. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Ain’t going to get your car back,
” said Clement, sounding suddenly friendly. I stopped and faced him again. “But you might go and get yourself smoked.” This prospect seemed in an abstract way to interest him. “Pea’s been looking for that car for months, man. Saying it used to belong to his brother and shit.”

  “What happened to his brother?”

  “He got himself smoked.” He cocked his large head to one side and scratched idly at his neck. “Couple of guys from Morgantown. Had something to do with a horse. I heard they was really trying to smoke Pea Walker.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I heard that, too.” I could see this was difficult for Clement to believe. “So this Pea guy carries a gun, huh?”

  “That’s right. Big fat German nine.”

  “I suppose that’s the kind of thing you would know,” I said, considering his reputation as a master of confiscation. “Is that kind of thing pretty common around here?”

  “Ain’t no such thing as a flyweight with a gat,” observed Clement sagely, as he closed the black steel doors.

  “Amazing,” said Crabtree when I got back into the car and told him what I’d learned. He was grinning now. “We had the story pretty much right.”

  “Except for the sport, I guess, yeah.”

  “Nice to know we’re still skilled at that.”

  “Nice,” I said. We pulled back out onto Centre and headed downtown. Unlike Crabtree, who seemed in the last twelve hours to have found a cure for all his heartsickness, I felt clammy, mud-stained, and tired, and I was so desperate for a joint that I could smell from here the burnt spearmint flavor of the Baggie in the Galaxie’s glove compartment.