Werewolves in Their Youth

by Michael Chabon

  “You can’t trust a woodpecker,” he was insisting now to the Korg sisters, with that special undissuadableness of his. “They’re just too goddam unreliable. I could have told you that from the get-go.”

  “Who said anything about a woodpecker?” said Lisabeth Korg.

  By eight o’clock, there was not an empty stool at the bar, quarters were lined up seven deep on the lip of the pool table, and so many people were dancing around the jukebox that Mrs. Magarac, the owner, who had come straight from her twelve-step meeting, could barely navigate from the bar to the farthest booths with a sweating tray full of beer.

  “Well?” said the woman at the bar to the man she had cursed. The crowding of the Patch had forced them onto adjoining stools. She drew her bottle of beer across the air before her, taking in the noise and laughter and smoke. “Any likely prospects?”

  “Oh, my God,” said Jake. He closed his eyes. There was a migraine translucence in the skin around his eyes. He rolled his bottle of Pilsner Urquell, his fourth, across his brow.

  “What about her?” the woman said.

  “Which one?”

  “With the red hair. I know her. I think she works at the Thriftway.”

  “Oh, yeah.” He still had not opened his eyes. “I’ve seen her. Curly.”

  “Cute, I think.”

  “I dislike this,” said the man. “Can I just tell you that? I never came to a bar like this before. Why should I start now, just because—”

  “You never came to this type of bar before, or you never came to a bar in this manner?”

  “Grace, I think I’d better—I think I’m going to split.”

  “Don’t be a wiener, Jake.”

  “No, I’m just—”

  “Come on, weasel,” she said, aiming at him with an index finger. Looking at it, he went cross-eyed for a moment. “We made a deal. About tonight.”

  “Yeah, I know I made a deal,” he said. “And I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to go home alone, with a big goose egg in the romance department, while you zip off with Monsieur Olivier, on his little scooter, with his scarf tucked into his lapels—”

  “He’s here. That’s him.”

  Jake’s eyes snapped open and he checked out Olivier Berquet, just walking into the Patch. If he had really been expecting a natty little loafer-wearer, crest embroidered on the pocket of his blazer, sweater knotted cavalierly around his neck, he must have been disappointed. Olivier Berquet was not French at all, as it happened, but Québécois—a big-handed carpenter with a tall man’s stoop, long blond hair, and a massively handsome face, craggy and pitted, a face that looked as if it had been carved with a pneumatic drill by a tiny workman dangling from the sheer granite cliff of Olivier’s forehead. He wore a black motorcycle jacket, ripped blue jeans, and Roper’s boots. He was well known on the island both for the quality of his work, which was high, and for the terrible treatment his wife received at his hands, which—though never definitively established in a court of law or through some famous public incident of the sort popular among the Patch’s patrons—ranged, by local rumor, from the merely callous to the outright mean. At one time or another, he had troubled the evenings of all the island’s bartenders. Now he had begun dancing, working his hips and bobbing his big Gutzon Borglum head. He was a good dancer, consciously so, leggy and languid, his movements not so much in time to the music as in illustration of it.

  “He has a big butt,” said Jake. “I’ve noticed that’s something you like.”

  “Jake,” said Grace, not responding. She pointed to Jake’s other side. He turned. The woman with the curly red hair, who was in fact a checker at the Thriftway in Probity Harbor, was standing beside him. He knew her after all: Brenda Petersen. She and some of her friends had washed Jake’s car for him one Saturday morning almost six years earlier—his first summer on the island—to raise money for their senior-class trip. Since then their paths had crossed without issue or remark at least a couple of dozen times. Her bright red fusillade of skyrocket curls was her most striking feature, but her youth, her plumpness, and a startling lack of shyness all worked in her favor.

  “Hi, there,” she said. “Brenda.”

  She held out her hand, angled with a textbook display of confidence.

  “Jake,” he said.

  “I was wondering if you wanted to dance with me—” She registered the way Jake’s mouth hung open, the way Grace shifted a little on her stool. “But if you two are together I’ll just go back over to my table there and shoot myself.”

  Jake turned to Grace, with a face that begged for mercy, his mouth forming inaudible words. Grace held out her hand to the girl and they shook.

  “Grace.”

  “Hi. Brenda.”

  There was a wordless moment. “We’re just friends,” said Grace, with an embarrassed laugh. “Go on and dance, Jake.”

  The contrast between Olivier’s and Jake’s styles of dancing, had there been anyone in the bar sober or interested enough to notice it, was marked. Jake seemed somehow to wear not just his clothes but his entire body too tightly. He chopped at the air with his hands. He and Brenda didn’t speak to each other—the crowd on the dance floor had forced them up against the jukebox, which was clanging loudly with Tom Petty’s cover of “Feel a Whole Lot Better.” Brenda’s best friend, Sharon Toole, shimmied up alongside her at one point, rolling a mocking but not unfriendly eye in the direction of Jake’s dogged, cramped performance, and the two of them exchanged a smile.

  Jake’s departure from his place at the bar seemed to increase the male traffic around Grace. She remained folded carefully up into herself, legs crossed at the knee and then again at the ankle, fingers fitted carefully around the throat of her beer, but there was a perceptible rise in the volume and good humor along the adjacent barstools in Jake’s absence.

  Among those whom Grace found herself talking to was Lester Foley, who had come right toward her, in his off-kilter headlong style, head angled one way, shoulders another, listing to one side like Groucho Marx after a severe blow to the head. He had been drinking for an hour now and was at the nightly peak, such as it was, of his physical aplomb and his powers of concentration. At some point he had gone back into the men’s room to run cold water through his hair and comb it back neatly with his pocket comb. There were still a number of feathers in his beard.

  He reached out his right hand, with its three grimy fingers.

  “Now you stepped in it,” he said. He laughed a wicked little laugh.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I told you this would happen. I told everyone. Hell, I even told myself!”

  “Leave her alone, Your Honor,” said Mike Veal, looking a little uneasy. “Just ignore him,” he said to Grace.

  She had not let go of his hand.

  “Lester,” she said. “They used to call you Les.”

  “No more or less,” he said, automatically.

  “Do you remember me?”

  “Sure I do,” said Lester, without any great sincerity.

  “My parents had the place next door. Next to the Lichtys.”

  He pulled his hand from hers. “The Lichtys.” He scowled and squinted at her as if trying to read a surprising text printed in very small characters on her face. His wrinkles smoothed out, leaving a staff of clean pink lines on his forehead. The color left his cheeks. He was working harder than he had in quite some time.

  “I used to hang around with Dane a lot,” said Grace. “Their son. I braided your hair once, you probably don’t remember. I used to give Dane these crazy things, with seaweed braided in, and little sand dollars and junk we found on the beach.” She had started to braid the air on either side of her head, but now she put a hand to her mouth and laughed, as if she had embarrassed herself again.

  “Grace Meadows,” he said. “Blond girl?” He looked for confirmation of this recollected scrap of a summer fifteen years before. “Dane’s girlfriend? Used to ride around on that motorbike of his. Go swimming with him
in that cold, cold water. Always smoking my cigarettes. Grace Meadows, that you?”

  “That was me,” said Grace, too softly to be heard over the music.

  “Uh-huh. Well.” Lester stopped squinting, and left off trying to read her face. He rummaged around in the pocket of his filthy down coat and pulled out a surprisingly crisp one-dollar bill. “Well. You were crazy then, and I don’t doubt that you are probably crazy today. Everyone is crazy nowadays, which looking around I’m sure you probably noticed by now.” He laid the dollar bill on the bar. “A beer, please, Mr. Mike.”

  “Put that away,” said Mike, flicking the dollar back toward Lester. He drew a pint and handed it to him. “But after this one you’re cut off.”

  Lester opened his mouth to protest, but a big blond hand clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Good evening, there, Mr. Mayor,” said Olivier.

  “Oh, no,” said Lester. He peeled himself out from under Olivier’s hand, and, with a last squint sidewise at Grace, ducked around to the farthest corner of the bar, where he stood for a time with his knobby fingers wrapped around the untouched pint of Rainier.

  “I love that guy,” said Olivier without apparent affection. He looked avidly at Grace, his eyes crinkling in a way that some uncharitable islanders might have described as patented, or even ominous.

  “I thought I’d see you here,” he said.

  “I’m having a hard time believing it, myself,” said Grace.

  “Why didn’t you come tomorrow, like I told you? We aren’t playing tonight.”

  Olivier was the drummer for a local band known variously as the Tailchasers, the Chubb Island Four Piece, and Olivier and Bo and Johnny. They had a more or less permanent ongoing engagement at each of the four island taverns, which is to say that they played nearly every Saturday night at one of them, until the complaints mounted or Olivier got into a violent dispute with the proprietors, at which point, sufficient time having elapsed in the interval since their last appearance, they moved along to the next stop in the circuit.

  “I know,” said Grace. “You said you play country music.”

  “Most of the time.”

  “Well, I don’t really like country music.”

  Olivier cocked his head and stared at her, his forehead crumpled in mock perplexity at her chilly tone. He was smarter than he looked—a condition as rare on Chubb Island as it is anywhere else. Mike Veal handed him the beer he had ordered and Olivier drank down half of it in a swallow.

  “I’m not bothering you,” he said. “I should go?”

  She shook her head.

  “How’s the car?” he said, after a moment.

  He saw that her gaze was focused on Brenda Petersen and the dark little jerking man she was dancing with. “Who is that guy?”

  “That’s my husband,” she said. “His name is Jake.”

  “Your husband?” For a moment he looked puzzled. “That’s cool,” he said, with the eye-crinkle on again.

  “We’re getting a divorce.”

  “Oh.”

  “We haven’t had sex with each other in three and a half years,” she went on, with a sudden sweep of her arm. “We stopped living together back in January. We haven’t had sex with anyone else, either.”

  “Huh.”

  “No sex. At all.”

  Her husband had stopped dancing. He was standing in the middle of the dance floor, just standing there, watching Grace, looking as if—over the stomping of bootheels, over the labored whooping of off-duty sheriff’s deputy Royce T. Sturgeon, over the dog-kennel laughter of a Friday night in the Patch, over the sounds of the islanders all around him as they shook their hair, their long key chains, the fringes on their vests—he had heard or could guess every word that Grace had just said.

  Grace saw Brenda Petersen pulling on his arm, asking him if everything was all right. “I have no idea why I just told you that,” Grace said to Olivier. “I know I shouldn’t be saying it at all.” She turned and took hold of both his hands in hers. “I want you to forget what I said.”

  “Three and a half years,” said Olivier. ”Shit.”

  “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” she said. She stood up, or rather toppled in a more or less controlled manner off the stool, landing somehow on both feet. She still had not let go of his hands. “Come on.”

  “Tell you what,” said Olivier. “My buddy John just came in the door, over there. I have to get with him for just a minute and then I’ll take you up on that, all right?”

  Grace watched him go.

  She looked over at Jake again and saw that he was watching Olivier, too. He was rocking a little on the soles of his feet, and a weird, broken smile emerged. When Olivier came within a few feet of him, Jake held out his hand vaguely.

  Over the ten years since his arrival on Chubb Island, Olivier Berquet had been involved in seventeen minor altercations in taverns, and four out-and-out brawls, in which teeth were scattered to the night air and men went to the urgent-care center to have bits of parking-lot gravel tweezed from their palms and cheeks. His name had appeared twice in the police log of the local weekly, the Clam, and when he was convicted of battery there had been an item on page 1. It took less provocation than a drunken, jealous, hard-up man out on a despairing date with his estranged wife to get Olivier swinging, as everyone in the room well knew.

  On the jukebox, Jim Morrison shouted the last words of “Break On Through” and the song cut off. People stopped dancing. The cue ball slammed into the nine.

  “Is there a problem?” Olivier said, calmly, rubbing his chin.

  Jake reached out for Olivier’s right hand, and grasped it.

  “I just wanted to wish you all the luck in the world,” he said.

  There was no great sarcasm in Jake’s tone, and in its absence Olivier seemed a little confused. He nodded warily, letting Jake work his hand up and down, the way he might have shaken with a man in an airport holding a Bible and a stack of brochures.

  “Yeah,” said Olivier. “Whatever, dude.”

  As the next song, “Born on the Bayou,” came on, he pulled his hand from Jake’s and jived his way heavily across the Patch and over to John Bekkedahl, a fat, bearded man wearing a Sturgis T-shirt. “Fuckin’ yuppies,” he muttered. Somebody laughed.

  Grace went to Jake, who was standing by himself, still holding his hand out.

  “What happened to Brenda?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” said Jake. “She thinks we’re screwed up.”

  “We are.”

  “What’s the story with Olivier?”

  “I think I scared him off with my evident madness.”

  “Do you want to dance?”

  “No,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  “Meaning what?” said Jake.

  Not quite sure of the answer, they didn’t leave. They stayed past last call, keeping each other company at the bar, while the Patch, one by one or in twos and threes, exhaled its customers. Olivier went home with Carla Lacy, whose husband was on a boat in the Bering Sea, working fourteen-hour shifts feeding tuna carcasses to a rendering vat. Brenda Petersen left with a tall, good-looking kid named Al or Alf from Tacoma.

  At last, Mike Veal threw on the overhead lights, driving the remaining patrons from the inky crevices of obscurity and glamour into which they had tucked themselves. For them it was like coming to in an emergency room, and they went out, sour and incoherently sad. A few diehards headed down the road to Peavey’s, where the bar clock was known to be kept only seven minutes ahead of Pacific Standard. Still Jake and Grace remained on their stools, waiting out the ten-dollar bill that Jake had fed the jukebox. Mike Veal went around snuffing the neon signs, stacking chairs, and upending the other barstools. When he pulled the plug on the jukebox, they took the hint and settled their tab. Jake waited while Grace went to the toilet, and then they made cautious progress down the back hall and out into the chilly night.

  As they came through the back door Jake stumbled over Lester Foley, who w
as sleeping under a pile of blankets beside the Dumpster. Grace stopped.

  “Grace,” Jake murmured.

  “Sh-h-h.” She knelt down beside Lester, and then, gently so as not to wake him, peeled a lank strand of hair from his hollow cheek.

  “Grace, what are you doing?” said Jake. “Come on.”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Be quiet.”

  She drew two more strands of hair from the oily mass under his stocking cap and wove them with the first into a stiff, skinny braid. She looked around in the gravel and mud at her feet and picked up the discarded cap from a bottle of Oly. Biting her lip, she squeezed the cap between her fingers until it curved inward on itself like a jagged whelk. She threaded the tip of the braid through it, and pinched it closed. Looking at her handiwork, she rocked back and forth on her toes, the leather of her duck shoes creaking.

  “He’s just sleeping it off, Grace,” Jake said. He gave a tug on her collar, and she tipped back onto her heels. “He’ll be fine.”

  “He knew Dane Lichty,” Grace said.

  “Not the way I do,” said Jake.

  Jake’s car, a Honda station wagon, was parked at the far end of the lot. Jake started toward it, then stopped, and seemed to sag a little to one side. “Can’t do it,” he said. “I think I’ve had too much.”

  “Just get in,” called Grace, running under the steadily increasing rain toward her car. “I’ll take you.”

  They climbed into a raked, round-finned old Volvo P-1800 that looked gray in the halogen glow of the Patch’s security flood but was really an elegant pale yellow, somewhere between the color of a manila folder and the back sheet of a parking citation. Grace had bought the car three days before from Olivier Berquet, for six hundred dollars. A few years back, Olivier had flipped it over on Cemetery Road, racing to make the ferry, but he had not mentioned this to Grace, although everyone else knew the story. Olivier had suggested to Grace that she have someone look it over, knowing somehow that she never would.