Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  Although Eddie and Oriole went to bed at eight-thirty, the drinks he had poured into her appeared to have the unexpected effect of making her wakeful, and Eddie lay for what seemed like hours waiting for her to stop humming and commenting to herself in the next room and finally fall asleep. He was miserable. The fried food and all those ounces of cheap well vodka had begun to give rise to monsoon winds and tsunamis in his gut. There was still a narrow band of blue on the horizon, and he felt tormented by this last faint banner of daylight wavering at the limits of his vision. Although he had cranked open the windows, it was a warm evening, and the small guest bedroom was stifling. The weak breeze off the river did little to cool the room and carried with it a rich and bitter odor of hops from the Blitz brewery downtown. This was an unwelcome and nostalgic smell that seemed to intensify the weight of the summer night upon him. Every once in a while he thought he caught the cheering of the crowd and the flat patter of the announcer, wafted from the distant ballpark like the summertime smell of beer. He lay fully dressed upon the still-made bed, already regretting the crime that he was about to commit, forcing himself to concentrate on his own fitness for such a reprehensible act and on the bacon-and-flowers smell of a woman he had known for an evening in Juárez, many years ago.

  At last silence descended over the apartment, tentative and provisional at first, then all-encompassing. Eddie got up from the bed and tiptoed down the hall to Oriole’s bedroom. Her drapes were drawn, and it was impossible to see. The old woman’s alcohol-slowed breathing was so shallow that Eddie couldn’t even hear it, and the unexpected blackness and quiet of the room almost turned him back. He took a long, deep breath and tried to visualize the layout of the room. Many times in the past he had watched Dolores help the old woman dress, and it seemed to him that Oriole kept her jewelry box in the upper-left-hand drawer of her Empire dresser, which ought to be immediately behind him and about three feet to his left. Reaching back with the fingers of one hand outstretched, he felt his way along the wall to her dresser, which he did not so much discover as collide with, producing a loud report that fortunately did not seem to awaken Oriole. He pulled open the top left drawer, and immediately his hand brushed against a smooth, firm surface that his fingers told him must be the green morocco lid of the jewelry box.

  His heart leaping, he tucked the box under his arm, slid the drawer softly back in, and crept out of the room. He stepped into the relatively dazzling light of the hallway, and stood for a moment, breathing, his forehead against the cool plaster wall. There was no doubt in his mind that he had just broken something that could never be repaired. His old life lay on the other side of a jagged tear in the earth. He would never see Dolores again, although all at once he knew that seeing her again was the only thing he wanted to do. He remembered the photograph of her, on the Empire shelf in the sitting room, and went to look at it, indulging a brief and hopeless fantasy of returning the box to its drawer, getting in his car, driving back to Seattle, waking Dolores, pleading with her to take him back.

  As he came into the darkened living room, he saw something that nearly caused him to drop the box of jewelry. Oriole was sitting in the green chair, her old Zeiss binoculars trained on some place away to the north.

  “Gam?” said Eddie, after he recovered from the shock of finding her awake and in her chair, dressed in only a short, sleeveless white nightgown—more naked than he had seen her, or any old lady, for that matter, ever before. “Can’t you sleep?”

  She seemed not to hear him. She sat still and ghostly in the reflected light of the city below, in her transparent nightgown; her cheeks, her bare arms and shoulders and thighs were streaked with veins and fissures, mysterious and mottled as the face of the moon. He found it an oddly beautiful sight. She was staring out at a point across the river, on the heights of the opposite bank of the Willamette, scanning slowly back and forth across a line high above the horizon. She was looking, he guessed, for the house on Alameda Street.

  “I wonder if these goggles need a cleaning,” said Oriole. Her voice was little more than a whisper. “Do you know anyone who might be able to do the job?”

  “Are you looking for your old house?” Discreetly he set down the jewelry box on the dining table and went over to stand beside her.

  She nodded. “But I don’t seem to be able to make it out.”

  “I think it’s too dark, Gam. It’s awfully far away, too. I’m not even sure you’d be able to pick it out in the daytime.”

  “Oh, there it is,” she said. “It has a pair of stone lions on the lawn.”

  “I know it does,” said Eddie. “You can see it from here?”

  Again she nodded her stolid head, without lowering the binoculars.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “You can see it perfectly well. The azaleas have been lovely this year. Have a look.”

  She handed him the heavy old pair of 10x binoculars, through which, Dr. Zwang felt reasonably certain, it would be impossible to distinguish the old brown house, tucked into the shade of its fir trees, five miles away. He closed his eyes, and fit the field glasses to the sockets of his skull.

  “Lovely,” he said, keeping his eyes firmly shut. “I see the lions, too,” he added.

  “They’re colored, the people who live there now,” said Oriole. “But very nice.”

  He turned his head and trained the glasses on the luminous cup of the ballpark, at those far-off happy men dressed in suits of brilliant white.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said. He handed her the binoculars, picked up the box of jewels, and walked brazenly into her bedroom, where, as though she had asked him to, he replaced the box in the drawer. Perhaps it was no extravagance, after all, to have faith in oneself, or perhaps he was not quite down to his last dime in that regard. He closed the drawer with a feeling of renewed hopefulness. As he did so, however, he heard Oriole moaning, out in the living room—a long, slow, devastated sound, as of someone faced with the ruin of a dream. Eddie thought she might have fallen. He hurried back out to the living room to find the old woman standing, pointing at him with one outstretched arm that trembled from fingertip to shoulder, and he saw the real reason she had looked so oddly naked to him a moment earlier.

  “You!” she cried. “You’ve stolen my beautiful necklace!” She clawed with one hand at the emptiness at her throat.

  “What?” Eddie took a step backward. Was he that drunk? Had he stolen the necklace without knowing it? “No,” he said. “Gam, I didn’t! It—it must have fallen off.”

  “It isn’t here! You’ve stolen it!”

  Eddie held out his hands, palms upward, and took a step toward the old woman, but she drew back, and covered her face with her shaking arm.

  “No, no, no, no! Don’t you come near me!”

  As quickly as that, placid old Oriole Box became hysterical, and started to shriek. Eddie had heard such shrieking issuing only from the worst and most desperate corners of the world—from the back room of a police station in downtown Los Angeles at four o’clock in the morning, on the shoulder of a highway in the wake of a bloody accident that had killed a young husband, from some distant corridor of the Swedish Hospital emergency room as he sat beside Dolores through the evening of her miscarriage.

  “Gam,” said Eddie helplessly. “Please. Calm down.” He switched on a lamp, and the sudden efflorescence of light seemed to take the old woman by surprise. Abruptly she fell silent. Again Eddie started toward her, but as he did so he tripped on something and fell forward. The old woman reached out as if to catch him, and although Eddie knew she had only meant to ward him off, he lay happy in her arms, and for an instant she bore the weight of him. Then she shook herself free, and he sank to his knees before her, and something glittering caught his eye. It was Oriole’s necklace, lying in a crooked coil on the carpet underneath the green hassock.

  “There it is,” he sang out, with a cheerfulness he didn’t feel. “I found it.”

  Eddie crawled over to the hassock on his hands and knees.
He reached under it and fished out the necklace, then handed it up to Oriole. He had made a narrow escape, for the second time that evening. What if Oriole had awakened the neighbors with her screaming? What if she had summoned the police? How it would have confirmed all of Dolores’s worst opinions of him to learn that he had been arrested for robbing her grandmother! He looked around for the thing that had tripped him up, and saw that the fine calfskin briefcase, heavy with the authentications and certificates of his defeat, was lying flat on the floor behind him.

  “Oh,” said Oriole. “Oh, thank heavens.” Her hands and fingers were still trembling badly, and he had to help her fasten the necklace around her soft old throat once more.

  “You just sit down for a minute in this chair,” he said.

  “My necklace,” said Oriole, running her fingers along the heavy gold branch, her voice coming breathless and faint. “It never leaves my body, you know.”

  “I know,” said Eddie. Perhaps he had not escaped quite as cleanly as all that. It was proving very difficult for him to look Oriole in the eye. He bowed his head. Pretty soon, if he kept on this way, there would be no one left in the world with whom he would be able to make eye contact.

  “What time is it?” said Oriole.

  “Almost nine-thirty.” He wondered if it wouldn’t be better for him just to get back into his loaded-down Volvo and be on his way. If he drove straight through he could be in Rosario by this time tomorrow.

  The telephone rang. Oriole lifted the receiver to her ear.

  “Yes? Oh, hello.” She patted at her hair, and drew upon all her ninety-odd years’ practice at the dissimulation of happiness and the repression of despair. “Yes, I know it is. And to think that I was just thinking of you!”

  Eddie went to the window and looked north across the city, to the river and the lights and the distant black ribbon of his old life.

  “You did?” Oriole was saying. “Well, and I’m sure you got a good price for it. It’s such a darling house.”

  Dolores; their house in Juanita had been on the market for months. She hadn’t wanted to sell it, but Eddie needed the cash, and on her gym teacher’s salary she’d had no way of buying him out. A part of him was anxious to find out how much Dolores had gotten for the house, but just now that part seemed a small one, with a weak and ineffectual voice in the council of his heart.

  Just as he understood that he really did belong in the morass of debt and hopelessness in which he had become mired, he looked down, into the Farnham’s parking lot, and saw that the familiar black LTD, gleaming orange in the halogen light of the parking lot, had pulled up alongside his Volvo station wagon. Eddie reached for the Zeiss binoculars and watched, with a bleak fascination, as the man in the turban climbed out of the passenger side of the long black car, accompanied by the woman in the red-and-black ski hat. The Sikh went around to force the lock on the Volvo’s door, and if the alarm went off, Eddie couldn’t hear it. In another moment the man with the angry beard had disengaged the Club lock (Eddie had heard you could freeze them brittle with a squirt of Freon, then shatter them with a gentle tap), hot-wired the engine, and driven off in Eddie’s car, taking with him all of Eddie’s stolen equipment—his slit lamp, Phoroptor, tonometer, ophthalmoscope—and his clothing and legal documents, his Al Hibbler records, his photographs of Dolores.

  Eddie didn’t move. He felt as though he himself had been blasted with a paralyzing dose of some cold, cold gas.

  “Now tell me,” said Oriole, to the abandoned woman on the other end of the line. “How’s that darling husband of yours?”

  Spikes

  ONE AFTERNOON TOWARD the middle of April, Kohn’s lawyer, her patience exhausted, called and said she was giving him one last chance. He was to come into Chagrin Harbor that afternoon and sign the petition in which he and his wife informed the state of Washington that their marriage was irretrievably broken. If he once again failed to show, his lawyer regretted she would have to toss his file into a bottom drawer, send him a bill, and forget about him. His wife, and her lawyer, would then be free to reap uncontested the rewards of his recalcitrance. So Kohn pulled on his big rubber boots and slogged up the path to the slough of gravel where he and his neighbors on Valhalla Beach parked their mud-encrusted Jeeps and pickups. There was a chill in the air, and Kohn’s large, unshaven head with its spectacles and stunned features was zipped deep into the hood of a parka the vague color of boiled organ meat. He peered out at the world through a tiny porthole trimmed with synthetic fur and heard only the sound of his own respiration.

  His marriage had been short-lived, a brief tale of blind hopefulness, calamity, and then the dismantling ministrations of psychotherapists and lawyers. Jill was ten years older than Kohn, a Chubb Island native, a Lacan scholar who taught at Reed College. She yearned to have a child. Kohn was an Easterner, socially awkward, obsessive. He was an instrument maker who built custom electric guitars, mostly for the Japanese market, and he preferred to keep his own yearnings pressed between the clear panes of a marijuana habit where he could safely observe them. He spoke with a slight stammer. His only good friend was one he had made in his freshman year of high school. Jill had mistaken his carpenterial silences, and a shyness that was purely physiological, for the marks of a sensitive soul. She was thirty-five and perhaps not interested in looking too closely or too far.

  She had gotten pregnant right after the wedding. They left Portland and moved back up to the Puget Sound, to her parents’ old brown-shingled house on Probity Beach. The baby, a son, arrived in March, and for the length of a baseball season the three of them were contented, in a blurred way that at certain moments resolved itself into sharp foci of happiness no wider than a dime, no more substantial than a smell of salt in the hollow of the baby’s neck as Kohn carried him up the beach to his grandparents’ whitewashed porch. In October, the baby spiked a fever of 106°. He lost consciousness on the ferryboat, in his mother’s arms, on the way into Swedish Hospital. He was buried, along with his parents’ marriage, in a corner of Chubb Island Cemetery, with some of his ancestors and cousins. They got therapy, but it was a waste of money and time because Kohn didn’t like to talk in front of the therapist. He grieved at odd moments, privately, minutely, invisibly almost even to himself. He did not, it was certainly true, grieve enough. He withdrew. Jill left him. She left the island and moved to a Siddha Yoga ashram, a former hotel in the Catskill Mountains once patronized by Kohn’s great-grandparents. She would never completely recover, Kohn knew, from what had happened, but complete recovery was probably not necessary. At least she had managed to put some solid geographical distance between herself and their disaster. It was as if she had been blown clear, while Kohn continued to camp, snowbound, on the steaming wreckage. He had moved out of her parents’ house, rented the tiny cabin on Valhalla Beach, set up his workbench, and resumed the slow production of his signature model, the Kohn Six, a flying wedge of flamed maple with locking tremolo and tuners and deluxe hum-bucking pickups with coil taps. He waited for the next intervention of fate, hoping this time to miss it when it came.

  When Kohn reached the muddy parking area, out of breath from the climb, he saw Bengt Thorkelson standing in the rain beside his mother’s Honda Civic, with a length of PVC pipe, swinging for the fences.

  Bengt was eleven years old and lived with his widowed mother in the Wayland house, three doors down the beach from Kohn. He was short for his age, and pudgy, with wiry dark hair and big eyeglasses. He ran with a slight wobble in his hips. On the beach at dusk, when he thought no one was looking, he practiced seagull impersonation, with some success. His best friend, Malcolm Dorsey, was currently the only black child on Chubb Island. That was all Kohn knew about him, except that walking on the beach one stoned morning the winter before, Kohn had come upon Bengt sitting on a driftwood log, in the rain, with his orange Lab mongrel Nerf, holding a polka-dot Minnie Mouse umbrella over both their heads, and sobbing. Kohn had hurried past him, head down, zipped tight into his parka. The
boy’s father, Kohn knew vaguely, had drowned or somehow been killed at sea. His mother was a buxom, energetic, foul-mouthed, kind of sexy woman who had once brought Kohn a strange casserole involving tofu, buckwheat noodles, and currants. Kohn avoided her, too. He kept his distance from all his neighbors, whose lives extended across Chubb Island from Valhalla Beach to Rhododendron Beach, from Chagrin Harbor to Point Probity, from the tops of the transmitter towers along Radio Beach down to the deep Cretaceous bones of the island. Kohn’s life fit into the back of an Econoline van.

  “Hi, Bengt,” Kohn said, moving slowly toward his van, the mud sucking in and spitting out the soles of his boots as he went. He was never comfortable saying the boy’s name, which must be the curse of his entire existence. Generally he veered between leaving off the t and trying to slip in as much of the g as he felt Swedish custom would allow.

  “Hi, Mr. Kohn,” Bengt said glumly. He crouched and picked up a penny from the ground by his feet. He was dressed in a bright red-and-white hooded sweatshirt that said RANGERS in blue script across the chest, stiff new dungarees, rolled, and a pair of ancient, pointy men’s cleats, tied with dress laces, much too large for his feet and apparently a hand-me-down from some remote ball-playing ancestor. A brand-new fielder’s glove lay on the ground at his feet. His fingers on the length of plastic pipe were pink with cold. He rocked back on his heels, raised the pipe like a hatchet behind his head, and tossed the penny into the air. Then he swung, as Kohn had seen him swing before, putting everything he had into a huge, wild hack that spun him around so far he almost fell over. The penny hit the mud with a splatter of rude commentary on his form.