Wonder Boys

by Michael Chabon

  “What?” said Crabtree.

  “What what?”

  “You sighed.”

  “Did I?” I said. “It’s nothing. I guess I was just wishing I could have been skilled at something else.”

  “Like what?”

  I hefted the manuscript that I held in my lap.

  “Like writing novels, for example,” I said. “Ha ha.”

  He nodded and adjusted his lips into a smile to acknowledge my little joke. We came to a stoplight and he slowed. The light turned green and he started off again and we sat there in Hannah’s tiny car that smelled of stale carpet and damp earth, not talking about Wonder Boys.

  “Is it really that bad?” I said.

  “Oh, no! It really has the makings, Tripp,” said Crabtree mildly. “There’s a lot there to admire.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “Oh, my God.”

  “Look, Tripp—”

  “Please, Terry, spare me the editorial boilerplate, okay?” I bowed my head until my brow hit the dashboard. For a moment I hung there, looking down, suspended like a bridge over the meandering turbid river of Wonder Boys. “Just tell me what you thought. Be honest.”

  “Tripp—” he began, then paused, searching for gentle phrasings and diplomatic constructions.

  “No,” I said, sitting up, too quickly, so that the blood drained from my head and left a net of winking phosphenes in front of my eyes. I was afraid I might be about to have another one of my episodes and so I started talking, fast, to drown out the white noise of the blood in my veins. “Listen, I’ve changed my mind, forget it. Don’t tell me what you thought. I mean, enough of this game. Enough! I admit I’m not done with the damn thing, okay? All right? Shit, that’s obvious. I’m nowhere near being done. I’ve been working on the thing for seven years, and for all I know I’ve got another seven years to go. Okay? But I am going to finish it.”

  “Sure you are. Of course.”

  “And maybe it has some problems. It wanders. All right. But it’s a great book. That’s fundamental. I know that. That’s one thing I know.”

  We were downtown by now; the great sinister bulk of Richardson’s County Jail loomed ahead of us. It’s a famous building and no doubt deservedly so, but with its keeps and turrets, its towers peaked like hangman’s hats, the empty stone eye sockets of its somber face, it always looked to me like a mad castle, filled with poisoners and dwarfs, in which children were baked into cookies and pretty songbirds roasted alive on long spits. This part of town was, if anything, even more deserted than the Hill; there was no one out walking on this blustery Sunday morning, and the streets were all but empty of cars. It would have been easy to spot a fly green Galaxie.

  “You still haven’t been honest with me,” I said.

  “You said you didn’t want me to.”

  “Because I don’t.”

  “All right, then.”

  “But tell me anyway.”

  “It’s a mess.” His voice was soft and not uninflected with pity. “It’s all over the place. There are way too many characters. The style changes every fifty pages or so. You’ve got all this pseudo-García Márquez stuff; with the phosphorescent baby, the oracular hog, and so on, and I don’t think any of that stuff is working too well, and then—”

  “How much of it did you read?”

  “Enough.”

  “You have to keep with it,” I told him. “You have to read on.” I was making the argument I had made to myself, over the years—to the harsh and unremitting editor who lived in the deepest recesses of my gut. It sounded awfully thin, spoken aloud at last. “It’s that kind of a book. Like Ada, you know, or Gravity’s Rainbow. It teaches you how to read it as you go along. Or—Kravnik’s.”

  “What’s that, Gombrowicz?” said Crabtree. “I never read that.”

  “Kravnik’s Sporting Goods. I just remembered.” I’d seen it a hundred times before, without ever really noticing it, on Third Avenue, near Smithfield. “Turn here. Left. I think it’ll be the first right, there, down the left-hand side of the street. Seriously, Crabs, how much of it did you read?”

  “I don’t know. I skipped around.”

  “Approximately, though. How much? Fifty pages? A hundred and fifty?”

  “Enough. I read enough, Tripp.”

  “Fuck, Crabtree, how much of it did you read?”

  “Enough to know that I didn’t want to read any more.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Look, I’m sorry, Tripp. I’m more than sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” He didn’t seem all that sorry. He was still spinning the wheel with aplomb, blowing giddy clouds of menthol smoke out the window. He was on the trail of Pea Walker and ready to negotiate for James’s salvation. “There’s nothing I can do with a book like that. Not now, I mean. It has too many problems. I hate to say it like this, Tripp, but I’m trying to be honest. For a change. I just can’t expend any time on Wonder Boys at the moment. I’m hanging by, like, three little molecules of thread at Bartizan. You know that. I need to hand them something fresh. Something snappy and fast. Something kind of pretty and perverted all at the same time.”

  “Something like James,” I said.

  “He’s my only hope,” said Crabtree, as we pulled up in front of Kravnik’s Sporting Goods and Outfitters. “If it isn’t already too late.”

  “Too late,” I said, feeling hollow.

  Kravnik’s took up the ground floor of a ten-story fireproof commercial block that, like most of the obsolete skyscrapers in this part of downtown, must once have been a bold flower of nineteenth-century capitalism. Its windows were filmed over with grime, and its stone face was tattooed with handbill glue. The sign, with its enormous red K, was ornamented at one side with a grotesque caricature of Bill Mazeroski, his skin bleached green by thirty years of weather. Translucent blue sunshades had been drawn over the grimy windows, so that they were all but impenetrable to the eye. It was one of an ever-dwindling number of such classic Pittsburgh establishments—half buried in dust and soot and an enigmatic mantle of central European gloom—that deal in rendering vats, piroshki presses, artificial wigs, and that regardless of the hour or day of the week always look as if they have been closed since the death of Guy Lombardo. There was a sign tacked to the front door of Kravnik’s, however, that claimed otherwise, in bright red letters.

  “We’re in luck” I said. “It’s open.”

  “Great,” said Crabtree. “Look, Tripp, just give me a couple of months, all right? Take a couple more months. Take a year. Pare it down. Finish the thing. I’ll be in a much better position to help you, you know, when you’re really done.”

  “A couple of months.” I felt no sense of relief at finally being granted the reprieve I’d dreamt of for so many weeks. The promise had a weak, bureaucratic ring to it, and anyway—pare it down? How would I know what to pare when I wasn’t even sure anymore of what the whole thing was about? “Look,” I said, pointing, trying to sound cheerful. “‘Free Parking in Rear.’”

  He nosed the car into a narrow passage that ran between Kravnik’s and the building beside it. As we pulled past the front of the store I tried to see in through the filthy aqueous windows but could glimpse only the dimmest outlines of headless mannequins, equipped for bizarre or outmoded sports—bearbaiting, the hammer throw, the hunting of stoat. We emerged into a large, irregular loading area, cluttered with Dumpsters and discarded wooden pallets, part of which served Kravnik’s as a makeshift parking lot. A few other narrow passages opened into the lot at odd intervals amid the surrounding buildings, and the whole thing was split down the middle by a broad central alley, running parallel to Third Avenue, all the way from Wood Street to Smithfield. There were half a dozen parking spaces designated as belonging to Kravnik’s and Crabtree pulled obediently into one of them, lining up between the stripes. Three spaces closer to the back of the store sat the Galaxie, empty, windows rolled; and beside this a ten-year-old Coupe de Ville whose license plate read KRAVNIK. The parkin
g lot was otherwise deserted.

  “Wait here,” I said, opening my door. I set Wonder Boys down on the seat, and fished around in my pocket for the keys to the Galaxie. “Be ready to leave quickly.”

  “I’m ready now,” said Crabtree, half humorously. “Seriously, Tripp, don’t you think we ought to just talk to him? I wasn’t planning on our having to, you know, actually burgle anything this morning.”

  “The guy isn’t going to want to talk to us,” I said. “He doesn’t trust us. He doesn’t like us.”

  “How do you know that? Why wouldn’t he?”

  “Because he thinks we’re friends of Happy Blackmore.”

  “Good point,” said Crabtree. “Hurry it up.”

  I stepped quickly over to the Galaxie and peered in through the rear window, shielding my eyes with the flat of my hand. The jacket had slipped down onto the floor behind the driver’s seat, but I could see that it was still folded fairly neatly and apparently unharmed. I got the door unlocked, grabbed the jacket, and tucked it under my arm. Then I climbed across the front seat and reached for the glove compartment. I felt a thrill of despair in my belly. There was no way the little bagful of Humboldt County would still be there. When I popped the lid, I knew, I would find only a deranged assortment of Mexican road maps and a race card from Charles Town marked with the names of Happy Blackmore’s unlucky picks.

  The reefer was still there. The glove compartment, I supposed, was as serviceable a stash for Pea Walker as it had been for me. I slid back out of the car, triumphant, and in my exultation jammed the rolled Baggie into the hip pocket of my sport jacket with a little too much zeal. My hand passed clear through the pocket, deep into the lining of the jacket itself “Shit,” I said, feeling a little stab of panic at the sound of tearing silk, and that was when it hit me that Crabtree didn’t plan to publish Wonder Boys at all. He was just going to write me off as a loss. The air seemed suddenly to have gone out of my lungs, my heart stopped beating, the sky was empty of birds and the wind died and I had ruined the pocket of my favorite corduroy jacket. Then I breathed in; a pigeon sailed overhead, and the wind sent a ghostly tent of newspaper scraping across the empty parking lot. I looked back at the Le Car and saw Crabtree watching me go about my thieving business, tapping on the accelerator every few seconds, a look of mild concern on his face.

  Without stopping to think about it, I climbed back into the Galaxie and took my accustomed place behind the wheel. I had the keys to this car: at the moment it seemed to me that I didn’t have very much else. The thing to do, I considered, was to back it out of the parking lot, take off down that long alley toward Smithfield Street, cross the Monongahela, and drive away from Pittsburgh at whatever speed that ancient Michigander engine could attain. There was nowhere on earth I wanted to drive it, but that was not the same thing as having a good reason to stay. I settled in, adjusted the rearview mirror, and slid the seat all the way back. I smelled a new but oddly familiar odor in the car, something gingery and sharp that at once made me feel less wildly numb and filled my chest with a faint welcome throb of regret. It was the smell of Lucky Tiger; Irving Warshaw and Peterson Walker wore the same brand of cologne. I smiled and slipped the keys into the ignition, but then I hesitated. Before I went anywhere, I would finally see myself rid of the things I’d been dragging around behind me all weekend like a ribbon of ringing tin cans.

  “What are you doing, man?” said Crabtree as I climbed out of the car again. “I think I hear someone.”

  Without answering I went around to the back of the Galaxie and opened the trunk. The tuba and the remains of poor Grossman were still lying there, apparently undiscovered. Grossman had done nothing overnight to improve the smell back here, and I wondered if Walker hadn’t been liberally dousing the interior of the car with Lucky Tiger in a doomed battle against the stench of rotten boa. I grabbed the battered instrument case in one hand, then took hold of Grossman with the other. He was stiff and heavy and gnarled as an ashplant.

  “What the hell is that?” said Crabtree.

  “What’s it look like?” I said. I figured the question would keep him occupied for a while. At the far side of the parking lot stood a disorderly battalion of green Dumpsters, and I headed toward them. Just as I started across the alley with my surrealistic burden I heard the squeal of a car low on power-steering fluid taking a tight curve, and looked up to see a familiar white delivery van, barreling toward me along the narrow passage Crabtree and I had come through a few minutes before. Pea Walker was in the passenger seat, and there was a much larger man, a white guy with a shaved scalp, behind the wheel, aiming the van straight at me. The guy’s tongue was curled at the corner of his mouth, as if he were concentrating very hard on attaining his goal. At a word from Walker, however, he cut the wheel and interposed the van between me and Hannah’s car, trapping me among the Dumpsters. Then he hit the brakes.

  Walker hopped down from the van and without a word came toward me, a sprightly little hop in his gait, cocking his head to one side as if delighted to see me again. He was dressed in a splendid aubergine tracksuit and an elaborate pair of sneakers, his shoes and suit embellished like a Mayan codex with all sorts of cryptic glyphs and pictograms. He was carrying a big bottle of something twisted up in a plain brown sack, and now he set it down on the ground beside him, regretfully, and gave it a fond little pat on the head.

  “Yo, Booger, the guy in the car,” he called to his friend.

  Obediently the other fellow jumped down from the cab and went after Crabtree, who chose the odd defensive maneuver of sounding the Le Car’s horn a few times in succession. When that proved unsurprisingly ineffective he started to roll, backing out of the parking space, then executing a quick three-point turn that put him in the alley, pointed toward Wood Street. In the process, and quite by accident, he managed to knock down Booger, the bald boy, and iron out the wrinkles in his right foot with one pass of the left rear tire.

  “Jesus!” said Booger. He lay there on the ground, propped up on his elbows. He looked insulted. I turned my attention back to Pea Walker, watching for the gun Clement had mentioned, but to my surprise as he came at me Walker brandished only his fists, working them around in the air before him like a kitten reaching for a string. They were thick and misshapen as the knuckles of an apple tree. I had at least a hundred pounds on him. I smiled. Walker smiled too. His eyes were bloodshot, his head teetered on his neck, and. he was missing several fairly important teeth from that smile of his. I wondered if he knew.

  Right as I was considering the strategic value of just letting the guy hit me a few times with his washed-up-flyweight fists, he reached into the waistband of his purple warm-up suit and pulled out a ridiculously big piece the width of whose muzzle was exceeded only by that of his desolate smile. His firing hand wasn’t all that steady, but I supposed that at this range it didn’t need to be.

  I made a feint to the left, and then cut toward the rolling Le Car. I was not so mobile, however, with my tuba and snake part, and he danced in front of me, cutting me off from Crabtree again.

  “Hey, Pea,” I said.

  “What up?” he said.

  We stood there for a minute, a mangy, overweight purblind minotaur and a broken-down and toothless Theseus with a shaky shooting hand, facing each other at the common center of our disparate labyrinths. The wind had picked up considerably and the air around us was filled with dust devils and rattling gusts of rubbish.

  “Tripp!” said Crabtree, in warning or as a kind of desperate wish. He was drifting off down the alleyway, slowly, as if he meant to give me one last chance to join him before he abandoned me once and for all.

  Walker looked over at the Renault, and while his head was turned I raised the heavy staff of Grossman’s body over my head and—like Aaron, the silver-tongued shadow of Moses—hurled it at him. It struck him squarely in the face, with a loud crack, and he fell backward. The nine flew out of his hand and went clattering like an old roller skate across the parking lot. I ran
down the alley, kicking through drifting strands of debris, swinging the tuba out ahead of me, the jacket tucked under my arm. I had my eyes fixed on the rickety knees of Booger, who was up again and hobbling after the Le Car—rather halfheartedly, it seemed to me. He probably had no idea whom he was chasing, or why. As for Crabtree, he could easily have outpaced Booger but he was still crawling along the alleyway at two miles per, with the passenger door hanging open, waiting for me. As soon as I drew even with the unfortunate Booger I brought the tuba around, aiming cruelly for his kneecaps. My aim was a little off, though, and I hit him in the belly instead, knocking the breath from his lungs in a single gust. He stumbled for a couple of steps before toppling over. A filthy tangle of packing tape and newspaper came rolling at him along the alley like a tumbleweed and adhered momentarily to the side of his head before blowing on past.

  “You hit me with a tuba,” he said, looking at me with an air of hurt surprise.

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  A sheet of paper came whistling up and flattened itself against my face. I peeled it away. It was a piece of twenty-pound bond and glancing at it I found that it described the most awful moment of an inglorious chapter in the medical career of Culloden Wonder, chief scoundrel and patriarch of that inglorious clan. I looked over at the Le Car, and saw that Crabtree had been driving so slowly not because he was waiting for me but because he was engaged in an ongoing battle with the open door of the car, trying, all at the same time, to close it, to flee the alley, and, if possible, to prevent the wind from carrying off every last page of my novel. The air was filled with Wonder Boys; I saw now that its pages made up a fair portion of the trash that was blowing through the alleyway and across the parking lot. Pages were settling like fat snowflakes on Booger, and brushing up like kittens against my legs.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Crabtree, stop the car!”

  Crabtree stopped and climbed out, and together we started to try to save what we could, plucking sheets of paper from the air, raking them like leaves from the pavement.