Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

After practice was over, Kohn drove them both back to Valhalla Beach. The boy was silent. He seemed to be reviewing all of the errors he had made, the rallies he had scotched. Kohn searched for the appropriate platitudes and encomiums. Before he knew it they were home. He steered the van back into the swamped half-acre of mud and gravel.

  “Well,” he began.

  “That’s my gran’s car,” Bengt said, pointing to a sober gray Dart parked beside the Civic. He jumped out of the van and ran down the rickety wooden steps that led to his house, without remembering to say good-bye. Kohn walked down the hill to his own house, and called his lawyer to apologize. The secretary said she wasn’t in, and would not be able to take his calls anymore.

  A few days later when Kohn went into Seattle to buy lumber and saw blades and screens for his bong, he spotted a pair of flashy baseball shoes in the window of an athletic shoe store on Forty-fifth. They were absurdly beautiful things, a cross between architecture and graffiti, wrapped in blue tissue. They cost a hundred and fifty-two dollars and forty-two cents. Kohn laid down two fifties, two twenties, a ten and three ones, then reached into the pocket of his coat.

  “I believe I have the two cents,” he said.

  The Harris Fetko Story

  THE HOTEL IN TACOMA was a Luxington Parc. There was one in Spokane, one in Great Falls, and another in downtown Saskatoon. It was half motor lodge, half state-of-the-art correctional institution, antacid pink with gun-slit windows. There was a stink of chlorine from the waterfall in the atrium where the chimes of the elevators echoed all night with a sound like a dental instrument hitting a cold tile floor. A message from Norm Fetko, Harris’s father, was waiting at the desk on Friday night when the team got in. It said that on the previous Friday Fetko’s wife had given birth to a son and that the next afternoon, at three o’clock, they were going to remove his little foreskin, of all things, in a Jewish religious ceremony to be held, of all places, at Fetko’s car dealership up in Northgate. Whether by design or hotel policy, the message was terse, and Harris’s invitation to his half brother’s bris was only implied.

  When Harris got upstairs to his room, he sat with his hand on the telephone. The passage of four years since his last contact with Fetko had done little to incline him to forgiveness. He tended, as did most commentators on the Harris Fetko story, to blame his father for his own poor character and the bad things that had happened to him. He decided it would be not only best for everyone but also highly satisfying not to acknowledge in any way his father’s attempt at renewing contact, an attempt whose motives, with an uncharitableness born of long experience, Harris suspected at once.

  He picked up the receiver and dialed Bob Badham. There was no answer. Harris set the receiver down on the floor of his room—it was in his contract that he got a room to himself—lay down alongside it, and squeezed out the one thousand abdominal crunches he had been squeezing out every night since he was eleven years old. When he had finished, he got up, went into the bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror with approval and dispassion. He was used from long habit to thinking of his body as having a certain monetary value or as capable of being translated, mysteriously, into money, and if it were somehow possible, he would have paid a handsome sum to purchase himself. He turned away from the mirror and sat down on the lid of the toilet to trim the nails of his right hand. When his nails were clipped and filed square, he went back out to pick up the telephone. It was still ringing. He hung up and dialed Bob’s work number.

  “Screw you, Bob,” Harris said cheerfully to Bob Badham’s voice-mail box. “I mean, hello.” He then left a detailed account of his current whereabouts and telephone number, the clean result of his most recent urine test, and the next destination on the team’s schedule, which was Boise, a Holiday Inn, on July 5. Harris possessed the sort of wild, formless gift that attracted the gaze of harsh men and disciplinarians, and the whole of his twenty-six years had been lived under the regimens of hard-asses. Bob Badham was merely the latest of these.

  There was a knock at the door. Harris went to answer it in his pin-stripe bikini briefs, hoping, not quite unconsciously, that he would find an attractive female member of the Western Washington Association of Mortgage Brokers (here for their annual convention) come to see if it was really true that the briefly semi-notorious Harris Fetko was in the hotel.

  “Why aren’t you in bed?” said Lou Sammartino.

  The coach of the Regina Kings club of the North American Professional Indoor Football League was not, as it happened, a hard-ass. He indulged his players far more than most of them deserved—housing them with his family when things went badly for them; remembering their birthdays; nudging them to save receipts, phone their wives, pay their child support. He was an intelligent man of long experience who, like many coaches Harris had played for, believed, at this point in his career rather desperately, in the myth of the football genius, a myth in which Harris himself, having been raised by a football genius, had learned by the age of seventeen to put no stock whatever. Lou Sammartino believed that the problem of winning at football was surely one susceptible to the systematic application of an inspired and unbiased mind. His lifetime record as a coach, including a stint in the short-lived Mexican Football League of 1982, was 102—563. He pushed past Harris and barked at his quarterback to close the door. He was hunched and rotund, with a jowly, pocked face and immense black-rimmed spectacles. The smell of his cologne was exactly like that of the tiny red cardboard pine trees that dangle from the rearview mirrors of taxicabs.

  “What’s the matter?” said Harris. He looked out into the hallway, in both directions, then closed the door against the stiff artificial breeze that came howling down the deserted corridor.

  “We need to talk.” Lou sat down on the bed and studied Harris. His watery brown eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were beautiful in a way that suited his losing record. “You called your PO?”

  “I left a message.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to see him in person when you’re home?”

  “I’m not home,” said Harris. “Technically. My home is Seattle. We’re in Tacoma.”

  “Technically,” said Lou. “A word much beloved of fuckups.”

  “Something to drink?” Harris went to the minibar. There was nothing in it except for a rattling ice tray and a ghostly smell of caulk. The minibars were always empty in Luxington Parcs and in most of the other hotels the Regina Kings patronized. Often they were not even plugged in. “I’m supposed to have six bottles of mineral water,” Harris said. He tried not to sound petulant, but it was difficult, because he was feeling petulant.

  “Aw,” said Lou.

  “I’m sick of this!” Harris slammed the refrigerator door shut. “Every fucking time I walk into my room and open the minibar door, there’s supposed to be six fucking bottles of mineral water in there.” The slammed door rebounded and bashed into the wall beside the minibar. Its handle gouged a deep hole in the wallboard. Crumbs of plaster spattered the floor. Harris ran his fingers along the edges of the hole he had made in the wall. A feeling of remorse took wing in his chest, but with an old, sure instinct, he caught it and neatly twisted its neck. He turned to Lou, trying to look certain of himself and his position. The truth was that Harris didn’t even like mineral water; he thought it tasted like saliva. But it was in his contract. “So, okay, talk. It’s past my bedtime.”

  “Harris, in a minute or two there’s someone coming up here with a proposition for you.” Just as he said this, there was another knock at the door. Harris jumped. “He wants to offer you a job.”

  “I already have a job.”

  Lou turned up the corners of his mouth but somehow failed to produce a viable smile.

  “Lou,” said Harris, and his heart started to pound. “Please tell me the league isn’t folding.”

  There had been rumors to this effect since before the season even began; attendance at games in all but a few sports-starved cities was declining by a thousand or more every week
end, the owner of the Portland team had been murdered by Las Vegas wiseguys, and the Vancouver bank on whose line of credit the NAPIFL depended for its operating costs was under investigation by the government of Canada.

  Lou stroked the bedspread, smoothing it, watching the back of his hand.

  “I just want to play out the schedule,” he said sadly. “I could be happy with that.”

  “Harris?” said a man on the other side of the door. “You there?”

  Harris put on his jeans and went to the door.

  “Oly,” he said. He took a step back into the room. The man at the door was enormous, six feet eight inches tall, just shy of three hundred pounds. Like Norm Fetko a member of the 1955 national champions and—unlike Fetko—a successful businessman, purveyor of a popular topical analgesic, Oly Olafsen had always been the biggest man Harris knew, a chunk of the northern ice cap, a piece of masonry, fifteen tons of stone, oak, and gristle supporting eight cubic inches of grinning blond head. He wore silver aviator eyeglasses and a custom-tailored suit, metallic gray, so large and oddly proportioned that it was nearly unrecognizable as an article of human clothing and appeared rather to have been designed to straiten an obstreperous circus elephant or to keep the dust off some big, delicate piece of medical imaging technology.

  “How’s my boy?” said Oly.

  It had been Oly Olafsen’s money, more or less, that Harris had used, more or less without Oly’s knowing about it, to purchase the pound of cocaine the police had found under the rear bench of Harris’s 300ZX when they pulled him over that night on Ravenna Avenue. He gave Harris’s hand a squeeze that compressed the very bones.

  “So,” he went on, “the coach has got himself another son after all these years. That’s a thought, isn’t it? Wonder what he’s got cooked up for this one.”

  This remark angered Harris, whom the sporting world for two hectic and disappointing collegiate seasons had known as Frankenback. Among the failings of his character exposed during that time was a total inability to stand up to teasing about any aspect of his life, his father’s experimentation least of all. With a great effort and out of an old habit of deference to his father’s cronies, he got himself to smile, then realized that Oly wasn’t teasing him at all. On the contrary, there had been in Oly’s soft voice a disloyal wrinkle of concern for the fate, at his great idol’s hands, of the latest little Fetko to enter the world.

  “Yeah, he asked me out to the showroom tomorrow,” Harris said. “To the thing where they, what’s that, circumcise the kid.”

  “Are you people Jewish?” said Lou, surprised. “I didn’t know.”

  “We’re not. Fetko isn’t. I guess his new wife must be.”

  “I’ll be there. Ah!” Gingerly—his knees were an ancient ruin of cartilage and wire—Oly lowered himself into the desk chair, which creaked in apparent horror at the slow approach of his massive behind. “As a matter of fact, I’m paying for the darn thing.” Oly smiled, then took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. When he put the glasses back on, he wasn’t smiling anymore. “The coach has got himself into a little bit of a tight spot out there in Northgate,” he said, pressing his palms together as if they represented the terrific forces that were putting the squeeze on Fetko. “I know things haven’t been, well, the greatest between you two since … everything that happened, but the coach—Harris, he’s really putting his life back together. He’s not—”

  “Get to the point,” said Harris.

  An odd expression came over Oly’s generally peaceful and immobile face. His eyebrows reached out to each other over the bridge of his nose, and his tiny, pale lips compressed into a pout. He was unhappy, possibly even actively sad. Harris had never imagined that Oly might ever be feeling anything but hunger and gravitation.

  “Harris, I’m not going to lie to you, the old man could really use a little help,” said Oly. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. I don’t know if Lou has mentioned it, but the coach and I—”

  “I told him,” said Lou. “Harris isn’t interested.”

  “Isn’t he?” Oly looked at Lou, his face once again a region of blankness, his eyes polite and twinkling. He had pleasant, vacant little eyes that, along with his bulk and a recipe purchased in 1963 from a long-dead Chinese herbalist in the International District for $250, had enabled him to do what was necessary to make Power Rub the number-three topical analgesic in the western United States. “Somebody might think he would be very interested in finding another job, seeing as how this outfit of yours is about to go belly-up.” He turned his flashbulb eyes toward Harris now. “Seeing as how what they call gainful employment is a condition of his parole.”

  “If that happens, and I don’t personally feel that it will, Harris can find another job. He doesn’t need any help from you.”

  “What is he going to do? He doesn’t know how to do anything but be a quarterback! It’s in his genes, it’s in his blood particles. It’s wired into his darn brain. No, I figure he has to be very interested in hearing about an opportunity like this. A chance to actually redefine the position, at twice his present salary, in front of a guaranteed national cable audience of forty-four million homes.”

  Harris was accustomed to having his disposition discussed and his fate decided, in his presence, by other people; it was part of that same mysterious alchemy that could transmute his body into cash and of the somewhat less obscure process that had sent him to Ellensburg for nineteen months. But at the mention of cable television, he could not restrain himself.

  “What is it?” he said. “What opportunity?” Oly reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a manila envelope, folded in half. He took a color brochure from the envelope and handed it to Harris. Harris sat down on the bed to read. It was a prospectus designed to attract investors to a league that would feature a sport that the brochure called Powerball, “the first new major American sport in a hundred years,” to be played in every major city in the United States, apparently by men in garish uniforms that were part samurai armor and part costume de ballet, one of whom was depicted, on the airbrushed cover of the brochure, swinging across the playing arena from a striped rappelling cable. The description was vague, but, as far as Harris could tell, Powerball appeared to be an amalgam of rugby, professional wrestling, and old pirate movies. It was not football or anything close to football. Once Harris realized this, he skimmed through such phrases as “speed, drama, and intense physical action … the best elements of today’s most popular sports … our proposed partnership with the Wrestling Channel … all the elements are in place … revolutionary, popular, and, above all, profitable …” until he turned to the last page and found a photograph of his father beside a caption that identified him as “coaching great Norm Fetko, inventor of Powerball, part owner and coach of the Seattle franchise.”

  “Fetko invented this crap?” said Harris, tossing the brochure onto the floor.

  “It came to him in a dream,” said Oly, looking solemn. He raised his hands to his eyes and spread his thick fingers, watching the air between them as it shimmered with another one of Norm Fetko’s lunatic visions. “A guy … with a football under his arm … swinging from a rope.” Oly shook his head as if awestruck by the glimpse Harris’s father had vouchsafed him into the mystic origins of the future of American sport. “This will be big, Harris. We already have a line on investors in nine cities. Our lawyers are working out the last few kinks in the TV contract. This could be a very, very big thing.”

  “Big,” said Harris. “Yeah, I get it now.” For he saw, with admiration and to his horror, that at this late stage of his career Fetko had managed to come up with yet another way to ruin the lives and fortunes of hapless elevens of men. None of Fetko’s other failures—his golf resort out in the Banana Belt of Washington, his “revolutionary” orange football, his brief (pioneering, in retrospect) foray into politics as a candidate with no political convictions, his attempt to breed and raise the greatest quarterback the world w
ould ever see—had operated in isolation. They had all roped in, ridden on the backs of, and ultimately broken a large number of other people. And around all of Fetko’s dealings and misdealings, Oly Olafsen had hovered, loving sidekick, pouring his money down Fetko’s throat like liquor. “That’s why he called. He wants me to play for him again.”

  “Imagine the media, Harris, my gosh,” said Oly. “Norm and Harris Fetko reunited, that would sell a few tickets.”

  Lou winced and sat down on the bed next to Harris. He put his hand on Harris’s shoulder. “Harris, you don’t want to do this.”

  “No kidding,” said Harris. “Oly,” he said to Oly. “I hate my father. I don’t want to have anything to do with him. Or you. You guys all fucked me over once.”

  “Hey, now, kid.” Another crack of grief opened in the glacial expanse of his face. “Look, you hate me, that’s one thing, but I know you don’t—”

  “I hate him!”

  Inside Harris Fetko the frontier between petulance and rage was generally left unguarded, and he crossed it now without slowing down. He stood up and went for Oly, wondering if somewhere in the tiny interval between the big man’s jaw and shoulders he might find a larynx to get his thumbs around. Oly started to rise, but his shattered knees slowed him, and before he could regain his feet, Harris had kicked the tiny chair out from under him. A sharp pain went whistling up Harris’s shin, and then his foot began to throb like a trumpet. The right foreleg of the wooden chair splintered from the frame, the chair tipped, and Oly Olafsen hit the flecked aquamarine carpet. His impact was at once loud and muffled, like the collision of a baseball bat and a suitcase filled with water.

  “I’m sorry,” Harris said.

  Oly looked up at him. His meaty fingers wrapped around the broken chair leg and clenched it. His breath blew through his nostrils as loud as a horse’s. Then he let go of the chair leg and shrugged. When Harris offered a hand, Oly took it.

  “I just want to tell you something, Harris,” he said, smoothing down his sleeves. He winched up his trousers by the belt, then attended to the tectonic slippage of the shoulder pads in his jacket. “Everything the coach has, okay, is tied up in this thing. Not money. The coach doesn’t have any money. So far the money is mostly coming from me.” With a groan he stooped to retrieve the fallen brochure, then slipped it back into its envelope. “What the coach has tied up in this thing, it can’t be paid back or defaulted on or covered by a bridge loan.” He tapped the rolled manila envelope against the center of his chest. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”