Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  “Come stand next to me,” said Dr. Halbenzoller slowly, as you would speak to a well-dressed and intelligent dog.

  Harris went over to the velvet-covered table and stood beside it, close enough to Dr. Halbenzoller to smell the steam in his ironed suit.

  “Do you have to be a doctor to do this?” he asked.

  “I’m a dentist,” said Dr. Halbenzoller. “Fifty years. This is just a hobby of mine.” He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and took out a slim volume of cracked black leather. “Bring the child.”

  Sidney Luckman Fetko was brought forward and placed into Harris’s arms. He was wide awake, motionless, his lumpy little pinch-pot face peering out from the blue swaddling cloth. He weighed nothing at all. Fetko’s wife left the room. Dr. Halbenzoller opened the little book and began to chant. The language—Hebrew, Harris supposed—sounded harsh and angular and complaining. Sid Luckman’s eyes widened, as if he were listening. His head hadn’t popped entirely back into place yet after his passage through Marilyn Levine, and his features were twisted up a little on one side, giving him a sardonic expression. This is my brother, thought Harris. This is Fetko’s other son.

  He was so lost in the meaning of this that he didn’t notice when several seconds had gone by in silence. Harris looked up. Dr. Halbenzoller was reaching out to Harris. Harris just looked at his hands, callused and yellow but unwrinkled, like a pair of old feet.

  “It’s all right, Harris,” said Fetko. “Give him the baby.”

  “Excuse me,” Harris said. He tucked Sid Luckman under his arm and headed for the fire door.

  He sprinted across the back lot, past a long, rusting, red-and-white trailer home with striped aluminum awnings in which Harris’s mother had once direly predicted that Fetko would end his days, toward a swath of open land that stretched away behind the dealership, a vast tangle of blackberry brambles, dispirited fir trees, and renegade pachysandra escaped from some distant garden. In his late adolescence, Harris had often picked his way to a large clearing at the center of the tangle, a circular sea of dead grass where for decades the mechanics who worked in the service bays had tossed their extinguished car batteries and pans of broken-down motor oil. At the center of this cursed spot, Harris would he on his back, looking at the pigeon-colored Seattle sky, and expend his brain’s marvelous capacity for speculation on topics such as women's breasts, the big money, and Italian two-seaters.

  These days there was no need to pick one’s way—a regular path had been cleared through the brush—and as they approached the clearing, Harris slowed. The woods were birdless, and the only sounds were the hum of traffic from Aurora Avenue, the snapping of twigs under his feet, and a low, hostile grunting from the baby. It had turned into a cold summer afternoon. The wind blew in from the north, smelling of brine and rust. As Harris approached the clearing, he found himself awash in regret, not for the thing he had just done or for shanked kicks or lost yardage or for the trust he had placed, so mistakenly, in others during his short, trusting, mistaken life, but for something more tenuous and faint, tied up in the memory of those endless afternoons spent lying on his back in that magical circle of poison, wasting his thoughts on things that now meant so little to him. Then he and Sid fell into the clearing.

  Most of the trees around it, he saw, had been brought down, while those that remained had been stripped of their lower branches and painted, red or blue, with a white letter, wobbly and thin, running ten feet up the trunk. Exactly enough trees had been left, going around, to spell out the word POWERBALL. Harris had never seen a painted tree before, and the effect was startling. From a very tall pole at the center of the circle, each of nine striped rappelling cables extended, like the ribs of an umbrella, toward a wooden platform at the top of each of the painted trees. The ground had been patiently tilled and turned over, cleared of grass and rubbish, then patted down again, swept smooth and speckless as an infield. At the northern and southern poles of the arena stood a soccer-goal net, spray-painted gold. Someone had also painted a number of imitation billboards advertising Power Rub and the cigarettes, soft drinks, spark plugs, and malt liquors of fantasy sponsors, and nailed them up at key locations around the perimeter. The lettering was crude but the colors were right and if you squinted a little you might almost be persuaded. The care, the hard work, the childish attention to detail, and, above all, the years of misapplied love and erroneous hopefulness that had gone into its planning and construction seemed to Harris to guarantee the arena’s inevitable destruction by wind, weather, and the creeping pachysandra of failure that ultimately entangled all his father’s endeavors and overwhelmed the very people they were most intended to avail. Fetko was asking for it.

  “Look what Coach did,” Harris said to Sid, tilting the baby a little so that he might see. “Isn’t that neat?”

  Sid Luckman’s face never lost its dour, sardonic air, but Harris found himself troubled by an unexpected spasm of forgiveness. The disaster of Powerball, when finally it unfolded, as small-scale disappointment or as massive financial collapse, would not really be Fetko’s fault. Harris’s entire life had been spent, for better or worse, in the struggling company of men, and he had seen enough by now to know that evergreen ruin wound its leaves and long tendrils around the habitations and plans of all fathers, everywhere, binding them by the ankles and wrists to their sons, whether the fathers asked for it or not.

  “Get your ass back in there,” said Fetko, coming up behind them, out of breath. “Asses.”

  Harris didn’t say anything. He could feel his father’s eyes on him, but he didn’t turn to look. The baby snuffled and grunted in Harris’s arms.

  “I, uh, I did all this myself,” Fetko said after a moment.

  “I figured.”

  “Maybe later, if you wanted to, we could go over some of the fine points of the game.”

  “Maybe we could.”

  Fetko shook himself and slapped his palms together. “Fine, but now come on, goddammit. Before the little Jewish gentleman in there seizes up on us.”

  Harris nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  As he carried Sid past their father, Harris felt his guts contract in an ancient reflex, and he awaited the cuff, jab, karate chop, rabbit punch, head slap, or boot to the seat of his pants that in his youth he had interpreted as a strengthening exercise designed to prepare him for his career as an absorber of terrible impacts but that now, as Fetko popped him on the upper arm hard enough to make him wince, touching him for the first time in five years, he saw as the expression of a sentiment at once so complicated and inarticulate, neither love nor hatred but as elemental as either, that it could only be expressed by contusing the skin. Harris shifted Sid Luckman to his left arm and, for the first time ever, raised a fist to pop Fetko a good one in return. Then he changed his mind and lowered his hand and carried the baby through the woods to the dealership with Fetko following behind them, whistling a tuneless and impatient song through his teeth.

  When they got back, Harris handed over Sid Luckman. Dr. Halbenzoller set the baby down on the velvet cloth. He reached into his pouch and took out a rectangular stainless-steel device that looked a little like a cigar trimmer. The baby shook his tiny fists. His legs, unswaddled, beat the air like butterfly wings. Dr. Halbenzoller brought the cigar trimmer closer to his tiny panatela. Then he glanced up at Harris.

  “Please,” he said, nodding to the fitful legs, and Harris understood that somebody was going to have to hold his brother down.

  That Was Me

  THE FOUR TAVERNS of Chubb Island, Washington, were haunted almost exclusively by local drunks. The summer people did their drinking on the porches and decks of their summer houses or, when that paled, under the paper umbrellas at the bar of the Yang Palace. At the V.F.W., and at the Chubb Island Bow & Rifle Club, out on Cemetery Road, they poured gin and vodka, but to the summer people these places were to be avoided, being just a hair too laughable to be legendary. From time to time, particularly toward the end of August, when
tedium, hot weather, and the dwindling promise of another summer agitated ancient Viking fibers in their brains, a party of adventurers from the pink and yellow houses along Probity Beach might attempt a foray into the Chubb Island Tavern, the Blue Heron, Peavey’s, or the Patch. But they never stayed long. The local drunks—there must have been about sixty-five or seventy of them, many related by blood or sexual history—were a close-knit population, involved in an ongoing collective enterprise: the building, over several generations, of a basilica of failure, on whose crowded friezes they figured in vivid depictions of bankruptcy, drug rehabilitation, softball, and arrest. There was no role in this communal endeavor for the summer islander, on leave, as it were, from work on the cathedral of his or her own bad decisions.

  It was unusual, therefore, to find not one but two attractive strangers at the bar of the Patch on a Friday night in early spring, studying the glints and gas bubbles in their beers: a man and a woman, with an empty barstool between them. It was not yet seven, and the Patch, a dank, ill-lit, cramped cement structure that had once served as the main building of a long-defunct strawberry-processing plant, was almost empty. In the corner across from the door, Lester Foley—elected by a plebiscite of local drunks to the mayoralty of Berthannette, a minute township made up of a general store and a post office, a failed Shell station, and the Patch—was sleeping, curled into a ball that did not seem large enough to be composed of an entire man.

  The man at the bar spun away on his stool from the dispiriting sight of Lester, rolled up like a potato bug with his hair matted down and a mysterious rime of white feathers on his beard, and gave his attention to the Patch’s decor: promotional posters listing the locations and dates of all the games the Seahawks had lost that season; the threadbare baize of the pool table; a small black-and-white photograph of a freak three-pound strawberry that had turned up in the summer of 1948; and the blinking, pink or blue names of several beers. The stranger was a dark-eyed young man, thickset but small of stature, better dressed than the usual Patch customer, even for a Friday night, in a tweed blazer worn over a crew-neck sweater that looked like lamb’s wool but might even have been cashmere. Only the fresh wad of black tape that bound up his stylish bronze eyeglasses, and the day’s growth of stubble on his cheeks, argued at all in favor of his admission, on a pro-tem basis, into the Chubb Island losers’ guild. There was something in the way his handsome jacket strained at the shoulders, in the gray shadow on his jaw, that implied a deep reserve of resentment, a list of grievances carried around in the billfold, on a sheet of paper split and tattered with much refolding. He looked like the kind of customer who drinks wordlessly, and without apparent pleasure, all evening, like a patient given control of his own morphine drip. He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.

  “I thought this was a happening place,” he said now, to nobody in particular, still gazing out into the neon gloom of the barroom.

  Mike Veal heard the remark but took advantage of a continuing pressure problem with the Rainier tap to let it pass. The customer was drinking a bottle of Pilsner Urquell, which Mike had found only after much digging around on his hands and knees, with his arm plunged far into the icy recesses of the No. 2 cooler, behind the box of microwavable Honey ’n’ Jalapeño Cheesy Pork Pockets. And of course Lester Foley had nothing to say on the subject of the happeningness of the Patch.

  “Why don’t you put a buck in the jukebox?” said the woman from her stool. “I bet they even have your favorite song.”

  She was a long, bony woman, with an intelligent face a little raw around the nostrils. In spite of her naturally blond hair and a backside that projected with a certain architectural audacity out over the rear edge of her stool, the predominant impression she seemed likely to leave in the mind of a man surveying a barroom on a Friday night was one of elbows and knees. Although she was dressed like a familiar type of weather-beaten, llama-raising, herbalistic island woman—denim overalls and duck boots, hair pulled back from her forehead by a plain blue elastic headband, face naked but for an uncertain streak of mauve on the lips—no one would ever have mistaken her for a native. She straddled her barstool with an equestrian aplomb that suggested both a genteel upbringing and an overeager attempt to look as though she belonged. A copy of Un Sexe Qui N’est Pas Une, in the original French, protruded from the right pocket of the big shearling coat she had draped over the seat of the stool between her and the man. Her fingers were devoid of rings.

  “ ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,’ ” she continued, with a vague wave toward the jukebox.

  “Is that my favorite song?” said the man. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a fat wallet. “I didn’t know.”

  “It’s on there,” said Mike Veal helpfully. “James Brown’s greatest hits, on CD.”

  The woman nodded. She raised her bottle of light beer to the man. “ ‘This is a man’s world,’ ” she sang, in a cracked little high-pitched James Brown wail. Then she turned away from him, folding back up into herself, as if she didn’t want him to get the idea she was flirting. The man took a dollar from his wallet and walked over to the jukebox. He fed several more dollars into the slot. “Sex Machine” began to play, as irritating and irresistible as a ringing telephone. The woman took a swallow of her watery, pale beer, her eyes comically wide, as if amazed by her own thirst.

  “This your first time in here?” Mike asked her.

  She nodded. “It always looked so hopping. Cars in the parking lot.”

  “It’s early yet,” said Mike, looking at his watch. “They’ll be showing up any time.”

  The tides of carousal on a Friday night on Chubb Island could be unpredictable. In general, the flow from Heron to Patch, Tavern to Peavey’s, was even and steady through the evening, but sometimes a special event, a darts tournament or a personal milestone such as a divorce, a birthday, or an acquittal, could bottle things up for an hour or two. “Unless all of them died in, like, a car crash or whatever.” He smiled with unconscious pleasure at this thought.

  She nodded again and took another swallow.

  “From the island?” said Mike.

  “No,” said the woman, “but I’ve been coming here my whole life.”

  “Family has a house?”

  “On Probity Beach.”

  “Nice.”

  “I have a house of my own now. On Rhododendron Beach. I’ve been living here almost six years.”

  “You’re a year-rounder, and you never been in here before?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. I guess I never had a reason before.”

  Leaving the question begged by this statement unasked, Mike went on tinkering with the Rainier tap. The woman lowered her eyes to the scuffed veneer of the bar, which was giving off its faint early-evening sting of ammonia. Originally, it had been the bar of Rudolph’s, a dive in a Quonset hut out at the old Navy airfield, which burned down back in 1956. There were some senior members of the losers’ guild who claimed they could still smell the fire on it.

  The woman dabbed an indecipherable sketch with her fingertip in the mist on her glass. “Do you know a guy called Olivier?” she said, not looking up.

  “Sure.”

  “He comes in here?”

  “Does he?”

  “I thought he did. I thought …”

  “Are you looking for him?”

  “No.”

  “Here,” said the man, returning from the jukebox with his wallet clutched in one hand and a twenty-dollar bill in the other. He handed the bill to the woman. “From yesterday.”

  “Oh, yes,” said the woman. “But it was only seventeen.”

  The man nodded. “I’ll take the difference in beer.” He held up his empty bottle to Mike Veal and gave it a shake. “Olivier?” he said.

  “Olivier Berquet,” said Mike, studying the two with fresh interest. “I guess he’s, what, a Frenchman?”

  “And I’ve heard an awful lot about th
at little Frenchman, let me tell you,” the man said. “The Phantom Frog of Chubb Island.” He turned to the woman. “How’s that for a title? Can you get a poem out of that?”

  “What’s your name?” the woman said to Mike Veal.

  “Mike.”

  “Mike, am I allowed to say ‘fuck’ in this bar?”

  “I wouldn’t try to stop you.”

  The woman turned to the man. “Fuck you, Jake,” she said.

  The door opened and, as always happened on a cold night when someone came in from outside, a low, mournful moaning filled the bottommost levels of sound in the barroom, humming around the ankles of the customers like a roiling cloud. The Korg sisters, Ellen and Lisabeth, walked in, followed in short order by New Wave Dave Willard, Harley Dave Sackler, Debbie Browne, Ray Lindquist, Nice Dave Madsen, and a number of other employees of the Gearhead plant, just down the road from Berthannette. Gearhead made accessories and specialty parts for sport-utility vehicles. It was the island’s largest employer and the source of a small but steady current of the Patch’s income. There had been an employees’ meeting tonight, after work, which was why the bar had remained empty for so long. Now, with a great deal of sorrowful moaning and gusts of cold wind, it filled up quickly.

  Lester Foley was awakened. This was done by Harley Dave’s cracking open a can of beer next to his ear, which was followed by uproarious general laughter when he scrabbled awake like a dog at the sound of a can opener grinding away on its evening Alpo. Lester grinned his foolish feathered grin, took the beer that was his reward for making everyone laugh, and started in on one of his trademark mayoral disquisitions whose interminability was relieved only by their total lack of sense. The former handyman had been drinking steadily since 1975. In June of that year, Lester had got a job putting up a boathouse and dock for a summer family named Lichty, whose handsome young son, a boy of fifteen, took to tagging along with Lester and helping him with his work. In the evenings they hid in the driftwood piles down at the dark end of Probity Beach, smoking marijuana and drinking beer. On the first of July, they drove out to the Nisqually reservation and for twenty dollars filled the hatch of Lester’s VW squareback with illegal fireworks. On the fifth of July, at two o’clock in the morning, at the end of the sturdy fir dock Lester had built, a Silver Salute with a defective fuse burst prematurely, before Lester and the boy could get clear of it. The explosion, which the investigator from the Chubb Island Fire Department had estimated as equal to the force of half a stick of industrial-grade dynamite, killed the Lichty boy and blew off Lester’s right thumb and forefinger. Since then he had not worked much. It was rare that anything he said managed to be succinct or intelligible.