Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  “No, you will not,” said Harris as Oly went out. He tried to sound as though he were not in terrible pain. “I’m not going.”

  Lou lifted Harris’s foot and bent the big toe experimentally. Harris groaned. A tear rolled down his cheek.

  “You broke it,” said Lou. “Aw, Harris.”

  “I’m sorry, Coach,” said Harris, falling backward on the bed. “Fucking Fetko, man. It’s all his fault.”

  “Everything else, maybe it was Fetko’s fault,” said Lou, though he sounded doubtful. He picked up the telephone and asked room service to bring up a bucket of ice. “This was your fault.”

  When the ice came, he filled a towel with it and held it against Harris’s toe for an hour until the swelling had gone down. Then he taped the big toe to its neighbor, patted Harris on the head, and went back to his room to revise the playbook for tomorrow. Before he went out, he turned.

  “Harris,” he said, “you’ve never confided in me. And you’ve never particularly followed any of the copious advice I’ve been so generous as to offer you over the last few months.”

  “Coach—”

  “But regardless of that, I’m foolishly going to make one last little try.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on a rumpled shirttail. “I think you ought to go to that thing tomorrow.” He put his glasses back on again and blinked his eyes. “It’s your brother that’ll be lying there with his little legs spread.”

  “Fuck the little bastard,” said Harris, with the easy and good-natured callousness that, like so much about the game of football, had always come so naturally to him. “I hope they slice the fucking thing clean off.”

  Lou went out, shaking his big, sorrowful head. Ten minutes later there was another knock at the door. This time it was not a lady mortgage broker but a reporter for the Morning News Tribune come to poke around in the embers of the Harris Fetko conflagration. Harris lay on the bed with his foot in an ice pack and told, once again, the sorry tale of how his father had ruined his life and made him into all the sad things he was today. When the reporter asked him what had happened to his foot and the chair, Harris said that he had tripped while running to answer the phone.

  They beat Tacoma 10-9, on a field goal in the last eight seconds of the game. Harris scrambled for the touchdown, kicked the extra point with his off foot, and then, when in the last minute of the game it became clear that none of the aging farm implements and large pieces of antique cabinetry who made up his backfield and receiving corps were going to manage to get the ball into the end zone, he himself, again with his left foot, nailed the last three points needed to keep them happy for one more day back in Regina.

  When the team came off the field, they found the Kings’ owner, Irwin Selwyn, waiting in the locker room, holding an unlit cigar in one hand and a pale blue envelope in the other, looking at his two-tone loafers. The men from the front office stood around him, working their Adam’s apples up and down over the knots of their neckties. Selwyn had on blue jeans and a big yellow sweater with the word KINGS knit across it in blue. He stuck the cigar between his teeth, opened the blue envelope, and unfolded the letter from the league office, which with terse, unintentional elegance regretfully informed the teams and players of the NAPIFL that the standings at the end of that day’s schedule of games would be duly entered into the record books as final. Lou Sammartino, having coached his team to first place in its division and the best record in the league, wandered off into the showers and sat down. Irwin Selwyn shook everyone’s hand and had his secretary give each player a set of fancy wrenches (he owned a hardware chain) and a check for what the player would have been owed had Lou Sammartino been granted his only remaining desire. Shortly thereafter, twenty-five broken giants trudged out to the parking lot with their socket wrenches and caught the bus to the rest of their lives.

  Harris went back to his room at the Luxington Parc, turned on the television, and watched a half-hour commercial for a handheld vacuum device that sheared the bellies of beds and sofas of their eternal wool of dust. He washed his underpants in the sink. He drank two cans of diet root beer and ate seven Slim Jims. Then he switched off the television, pulled a pillow over his head, and cried. The serene, arctic blankness with which he was rumored, and in fact did struggle, to invest all his conscious processes of thought was only a hollow illusion. He was racked by that particular dread of the future that plagues superseded deities and washed-up backs. He saw himself carrying an evening six-pack up to his rented room, wearing slacks and a name tag at some job, standing with the rest of the failures of the world at the back of a very long line, waiting to claim something that in the end would turn out to be an empty tin bowl with his own grinning skull reflected in its bottom. He went into the bathroom and threw up.

  When he reemerged from the bathroom, the queasiness was gone but the dread of his future remained. He picked up the phone and called around town until he found himself a car. His tight end, a Tacoma native, agreed, for a price they finally fixed at seventeen dollars—seventeen having been the number on the tight end’s 1979 Washington State Prep Championship jersey—to bring his brother’s car around to the hotel in half an hour. Harris showered, changed into a tan poplin suit, seersucker shirt, and madras tie, and checked out of his room. When he walked out of the Luxington Parc, he found a 1979 Chevrolet Impala, eggplant with a white vinyl top, waiting for him under the porte cochere.

  “Don’t turn the wipers on,” said Deloyd White. “It blows the fuse on the radio. Be honest, it blows a lot of fuses. Most of them.”

  “What if it rains?”

  Deloyd looked out at the afternoon, damp and not quite warm, the blue sky wan and smeary. He scratched at the thin, briery tangle of beard on his chin.

  “If it rains you just got to drive really fast,” he said.

  As Harris drove north on I-5, he watched nervously as the cloak of blue sky grew threadbare and began to show, in places, its eternal gray interfacing of clouds. But the rain held off, and Harris was able to make it all the way out to Northgate without breaking the speed laws. The Chevy made a grand total of seven cars parked on the lot of Norm Fetko’s New and Used Buick-Isuzu, an establishment that had changed hands and product lines a dozen times since Pierce Arrow days. It sat, a showroom of peeling white stucco, vaguely art deco, next to a low cinder-block garage on one of the saddest miles of Aurora Avenue, between a gun shop and a place that sold grow lights. Fetko had bought the place from a dealer in Pacers and Gremlins, banking on his local celebrity to win him customers at the very instant in history when Americans ceased to care who it was that sold them their cars. Harris pulled in between two Le Sabres with big white digits soaped onto their windshields, straightened his tie, and started for the open door of the dealership.

  A tall, fair-haired salesman, one of the constantly shifting roster of former third-stringers and practice dummies Fetko could always call upon to man the oars of his argosies as they coursed ever nearer to the maelstrom, was propped against the doorway, smoking a cigarette, as Harris walked up. He was stuffed imperfectly into his cheap suit, and his face looked puffy. He lounged with a coiled air of impatience, tipping and rocking on the balls of his feet. His hair was like gold floss.

  “Hey, Junior,” he said. He gestured with a thumb. “They’re all in the back room.”

  “Did they do it already?”

  “I don’t think so. I think they were waiting for you.”

  “But I said I wasn’t going to come,” said Harris, irritated to find that his change of heart had come as a surprise only to him.

  He walked across the showroom, past three metal desks, three filing cabinets, and three wastebaskets, all enameled in a cheery shade of surgical glove; three beige telephones with rotary dials; a dismantled mimeograph; and an oak hat rack that was missing all of its hooks but one, from which there hung an empty plastic grocery sack. There was no stock on the floor, a bare beige linoleum expanse layered with a composite detritus of old cigarette ash and the lost limbs
of insects. The desk chairs were tucked neatly under the desks, and the desktops themselves were bare of everything but dust. Aside from a bookshelf filled with the binders and thick manuals of the automobile trade and a few posters of last season’s new models tacked up amid black-and-white photographs of the owner, in his glory days, fading back to pass, there was little to suggest that Norm Fetko’s New and Used was not a defunct concern and had not been so for a very long time.

  “I knew you’d come,” said Fetko’s wife, hurrying across the back room to greet him. She was not at all what he had imagined—an ample, youngish bottle blonde with an unlikely suntan and the soft, wide-eyed look, implying a certain preparedness to accept necessary pain, that Fetko had favored in all the women he had gotten involved with after Harris’s mother. She was small, with thin arms and a skinny neck, her hair like black excelsior. Her eyes were deep set. She was certainly no younger than forty. Her name was Marilyn Levine.

  “I almost didn’t,” he insisted. “I’m, uh, not too wild about … these things.”

  “Have you been to a bris before?”

  Harris shook his head.

  “I’m not even going to be in the room,” Marilyn said. “That’s what a lightweight I am.” She was wearing a loose burgundy velvet dress and ballet shoes. This was another surprise. Over time, most of the women in Fetko’s life allowed themselves to become, as it were, themed, favoring grass-green muumuus patterned with stiff-arming running backs, goalposts, and footballs turning end over end. Marilyn touched a hand to Harris’s arm. “Did you know the coach stopped drinking?”

  “When did he do that?”

  “Almost a year ago,” she said. “Not quite.”

  “That’s good news,” said Harris.

  “He isn’t the same man, Harris,” she told him. “You’ll see that.”

  “Okay,” said Harris doubtfully.

  “Come say hi.”

  She led him past the buffet, three card tables pushed together and spread with food enough for ten times as many guests as there were in attendance. Aside from one or two of Fetko’s employees and a dozen or so members of Marilyn’s family, among them an authentic-looking Jew, with the little hat and the abolitionist beard, whom Marilyn introduced as her brother, the room was empty. A few women were huddled at the back of the room around a cerulean football that Harris supposed must be the blanketed new Fetko.

  In the old days, at a function like this, there would have been a great ring of standing stones around Fetko, dolmens and menhirs in pistachio pants, with nicknames like Big Mack and One-Eye. Some of the members of the ’55 national champions, Harris knew, had died or moved to faraway places; the rest had long since been burned, used up, worn out, or, in one case, sent to prison by one or another of Fetko’s schemes. Now there remained only Oly Olafsen, Red Johnnie Green, and Hugh Eggert with his big cigar. Red Johnnie had on a black suit with a funereal tie, Oly was wearing another of his sharkskin tarpaulins, and Hugh had solved the troublesome problem of dressing for the dark ritual of an alien people by coming in his very best golf clothes. When they saw Harris, they pounded him on the back and shook his hand. They squeezed his biceps, assessed his grip, massaged his shoulders, jammed their stubbly chins into the crook of his neck, and, in the case of Hugh Eggert, gave his left buttock a farmerly slap. Harris had been in awe of them most of his life. Now he regarded them with envy and dismay. They had grown old without ever maturing: quarrelsome, salacious boys zipped into enormous rubber man-suits. Harris, on the other hand, had bid farewell to his childhood aeons ago, without ever having managed to grow up.

  “Harris,” said Fetko. “How about that.” The tip of his tongue poked out from the corner of his mouth, and he hitched up the waist of his pants, as if he were about to attempt something difficult. He was shorter than Harris remembered—fatter, grayer, older, sadder, more tired, more bald, with more broken blood vessels in his cheeks. He was, Harris quickly calculated, sixty-one, having already been most of the way through his thirties, a head coach in Denver with a master’s in sports physiology, before he selected Harris’s mother from a long list of available candidates and began his grand experiment in breeding. As usual he was dressed today in black high-tops, baggy black ripstop pants, and a black polo shirt. The muscles of his arms stretched the ribbed armbands of his shirtsleeves. With his black clothes, his close-cropped hair, and his eyes that were saved from utter coldness by a faint blue glint of lunacy, he looked like a man who had been trained in his youth to drop out of airplanes in the dead of night and strangle enemy dictators in their sleep.

  “Son,” he said.

  “Hey there, Coach,” said Harris.

  The moment during which they might have shaken hands, or even—in an alternate-historical universe where the Chinese discovered America and a ten-year-old Adolf Hider was trampled to death by a passing milk wagon—embraced, passed, as it always did. Fetko nodded.

  “I heard you played good today,” he said.

  Harris lowered his head to hide the fact that he was blushing.

  “I was all right,” he said. “Congratulations on the kid. What’s his name?”

  “Sid Luckman,” said Fetko, and the men around him, except for Harris, laughed. Their laughter was nervous and insincere, as if Fetko had said something dirty. “Being as how he’s a Jewish boy.” Fetko nodded with tolerant, Einsteinian pity toward his old buddies. “These bastards here think it’s a joke.”

  No, no, they reassured him. Sid Luckman was an excellent choice. Still, you had to admit—

  “Luckman’s the middle name,” said Harris.

  “That’s right.”

  “I like it.”

  Fetko nodded again. He didn’t care if Harris liked it or not. Harris was simply—had always been—there to know when Fetko wasn’t joking.

  “He’s very glad to see you,” said Marilyn Levine, with a hard edge in her voice, prodding Fetko. “He’s been worrying about it all week.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense,” said Fetko.

  Marilyn gave Harris a furtive nod to let him know that she had been telling the truth. She was standing with her arm still laced through Harris’s, smelling pleasantly of talcum. Harris gave her hand a squeeze. He had spent the better part of his childhood waiting for Fetko to bring someone like Marilyn Levine home to raise him. Now he had a brief fantasy of yanking her out of the room by this warm hand, of hustling her and young Sid Luckman into the aubergine Chevy Impala and driving them thousands of miles through the night to a safe location. His own mother had fled Fetko when Harris was six, promising to send for him as soon as she landed on her feet. The summons never came. She had married again, and then again after that, and had moved two dozen times over the last fifteen years. Harris let go of his stepmother’s hand. Probably there was no such safe place to hide her and the baby. Everywhere they went, she would find men like Fetko. For all Harris knew, he was a man like Fetko, too.

  “Hello?”

  Everyone turned. There was a wizened man standing behind Harris, three feet tall, a thousand years old, carrying a black leather pouch under his arm.

  “I am Dr. Halbenzoller,” he said regretfully. He had a large welt on his forehead and wore a bewildered, fearful expression, as if he had misplaced his eyeglasses and were feeling his way through the world. “Where are the parents?”

  “I’m the boy’s father,” said Fetko, taking the old man’s hand. “This is the mother—Marilyn. She’s the observant one, here.”

  Dr. Halbenzoller turned his face toward Marilyn. He looked alarmed.

  “The father is not Jewish?”

  Marilyn shook her head. “No, but we spoke about it over the phone, Dr. Halbenzoller, don’t you remember?”

  “I don’t remember anything,” said Dr. Halbenzoller. He looked around the room, as if trying to remember how he had got to the outlandish place in which he now found himself. His gaze lingered a moment on Harris, wonderingly and with evident disapproval, as if he were looking at a Great Dane someone ha
d dressed up in a madras jacket and taught to smile.

  “I’m an existential humanist,” Fetko told him. “That’s always been my great asset as a coach. Over the long series, an atheistic coach will always beat a coach who believes in God.” Fetko, whose own lifetime record was an existential 163-162, had been out of coaching for quite a while now, and Harris could see that he missed being interviewed. “Anyway, I don’t feel I could really give the Jewish faith a fair shake—”

  Dr. Halbenzoller turned to Marilyn.

  “Tell them I’d like to begin,” he said, as if she were his interpreter. He took the pouch from under his arm. “Where is the child?”

  Marilyn led him over to the back of the room, where, beside the huddle of women, a card table had been set up and draped in a piece of purple velvet. Dr. Halbenzoller undid the buckles on his pouch and opened it, revealing a gleaming set of enigmatic tools.

  “And the sandek,” he said to Marilyn. “You have one?”

  Marilyn looked at Fetko.

  “Norm?”

  Fetko looked down at his hands.

  “Norm.”

  Fetko shrugged and looked up. He studied Harris’s face and took a step toward him. Involuntarily, Harris took a step back. “It’s like a godfather,” Fetko said. “To the kid. Marilyn and I were wondering.”

  Harris was honored, and wildly touched, but he didn’t want to let on. “If you want,” he said. “What do I have to do?”