remember the last time I’d had something to eat. I’d been forgetting to take my meals lately, which is a dangerous sign in a man of my girth and capacity. “We’d better skedaddle, James,” I said, in a mild panic, taking hold of James’s scarecrow arm. “Let’s get out of here.”
Forgetting that I had left wide open the door of Walter Gaskell’s closet, I got up and hurried out of the room. I switched off the bedroom light behind me, leaving James Leer sitting alone in the dark for the second time that day. As I stepped out into the hallway I heard a low rumbling sound that raised all the hairs on the back of my neck. It was Doctor Dee. Sara had freed him from the prison of the laundry room and he crouched in the hall, belly to the ground, paws outspread, his black lip peeled back from his yellow old teeth. His wild eyes were staring fixedly at the empty air beside me, at some distant arctic peak.
“James?” I said. “Guess who’s here? Hello, Doctor Dee. Hello, you old bastard.”
I flattened myself against the right-hand wall of the hallway and tried to brush past him, but he came at me. I panicked and lost my balance, stumbling over Doctor Dee, accidentally giving him a sharp kick in the ribs. The next instant I felt a stab of pain in my foot, somewhere in the vicinity of my ankle, and then I fell to the floor, hard. Doctor Dee scrambled to his feet and stood over me, his throat filled with a single long rolling syllable.
“Get away from me,” I said. I was afraid, but not too afraid for it to occur to me that dying torn to pieces by blind, mad dogs had a certain mythic quality that might work well in the section of Wonder Boys in which I planned to have Curtis Wonder, the oldest of the three brothers who were the central characters of my book, meet the fate that his colossal pride and his lurid misdeeds had earned for him. I raised my fist, as Curtis might, and tried actually to punch Doctor Dee, as you would slug a man, but he caught the blow in his teeth, as it were, and worked his jaw around the meat of my hand.
There was a sudden sharp crack! as of a rock against the windshield of a car. Doctor Dee yelped. His tail jerked straight up into the air like an exclamation point and ratcheted around a few times on its hinge. Then he toppled over onto my legs. I looked up, my ears ringing, and saw James Leer, standing half in the shadow of the doorway, the pretty little pearl-handled pistol in his hand. I yanked my legs out from under Doctor Dee and the dog landed with a soft thud against the floor. I rolled down my sock. There were four bright red holes in my foot, on either side of my Achilles tendon.
“I thought you said that was a cap gun,” I said.
“Is he dead? Did he bite you bad?”
“Not so bad.” I pulled my sock up and scrambled up onto my knees. Carefully I passed my hand around Doctor Dee’s head and cupped the moist tip of his snout in my fingers. There was no trace of his breath against them. “He’s dead,” I said, climbing slowly to my feet. I could feel the first delicate tickle of pain in my ankle. “Shit, James. You killed the Chancellor’s dog.”
“I had to,” he said miserably. “Didn’t I?”
“Couldn’t you have just pulled him off me?”
“No! He was biting you! I didn’t—I thought he—”
“Easy,” I said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “Okay. Don’t freak out on me.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to go find Sara and tell her, I guess,” I said, feeling the desire for a sweet poisonous glass of bourbon steal over me like a fog. “But first I’m going to get cleaned up. No. First you’re going to give me that cap gun of yours.”
I held out my hand, palm up, and he obediently set the pistol on it. It was warm, and heavier than it looked.
“Thanks,” I said. I slipped it into the hip pocket of my blazer, and then he helped me into the bathroom, where I washed out the puncture holes with foaming hydrogen peroxide and found a pair of Band-Aids to cover them up. Then I rolled up my sock again and tugged down the leg of my trousers, and we went back out into the hall, where the handsome old dog lay dead.
“I don’t think we should leave him lying there,” I said.
James said nothing. He was so lost in working out the ramifications of what he had done that I don’t think he was capable of speech at that moment.
“Don’t sweat it,” I said. “I’m going to tell her that I did it. That it was self-defense. Come on.”
I knelt down beside Doctor Dee and wrapped my arms around his heavy head. A dark red smear was turning to purple in the fur around the base of the right earflap, and there was a smell of burnt hair. James knelt and took hold of the dog’s hindquarters, a dazed, almost sweet expression on his smooth face.
“A little curl of smoke came out of the bullet hole,” said James.
“Wow,” I said. “I wish I could have seen that.”
Then we carried Doctor Dee down the stairs and along the endless driveway to the street, where we laid him out in the back of my car, on the seat, beside the tuba.
BY the time we arrived for the lecture, both of the school’s main lots were full, and we ended up parking in one of the quiet residential streets at the other end of campus from Thaw Hall, under an old stand of beech trees, at the foot of some happy professor’s driveway. I cut the engine and we sat for a moment, listening to the rain drop like beechnuts from the trees and scatter across the canvas top of the car.
“That sounds nice,” said James Leer. “It’s like being in a tent.”
“I don’t want to do this,” I said, filled with a sudden longing to be lying on my back in a little tent, peering up through the silk mesh window at Orion.
“You don’t have to. It’s dumb for you to tell her you did it, Professor Tripp. I mean, it’s a lie.” He picked at the threads fraying along the hem of his long black coat. “I don’t care what she does to me, to tell you the truth. She probably should kick me out.”
“James,” I said, shaking my head. “It was my fault. I shouldn’t have sneaked you up there in the first place.”
“But,” said James, looking confused, “you knew the combination.”
“True,” I said. “Think about that one for a minute or two.” I looked at my watch. “Only you can’t, ’cause we’re late.” I grabbed hold of the handle and leaned against the door. “Come on, help me get him into the trunk.”
“The trunk?”
“Yeah, well, I’m probably going to have to drive a bunch of people over to the Hi-Hat after the lecture, buddy. There isn’t going to be a whole lot of room for people with a tuba and a dead dog in the backseat.”
I climbed out of the car and tilted my seat forward. My fingers were cold and I could feel a very faint envelope of heat around the body of Doctor Dee as I passed my arms beneath it. I lifted without crouching first to gain leverage, and felt a sharp twinge in the small of my back. There was a vinegar tang of blood in my nose. James had gotten out of the car by now, and he came around to help me pitch the
