Michael Chabon - Summerland

All the boys, Roosters and Reds, turned to look at Ethan, as if wondering what tie or connection could possibly link Dog Boy to crazy, drunken, angry, wild old Albert Rideout.

It was too much for Ethan. He didn’t want to be a hero. He had no idea how to answer Albert Rideout. He was just a kid; he couldn’t argue with an umpire; he couldn’t fight against ravens and Coyotes and horrid little grey men with twitching black wings. So he ran. He ran as fast as he could, towards the picnic grounds on the other side of the peeling white pavilion where people sometimes got married. As he ran, he told himself that he was leaving a ball field for the last time – he didn’t care what his father loved or hoped for. Baseball just wasn’t any fun, not for anyone. He cut through the wedding pavilion, and as he did his foot slipped on a patch of wet wood, and he went sprawling onto his belly. He thought he could hear the other kids laughing at him as he fell. He crawled out of the pavilion on all fours, and found his way to the picnic tables. He had hidden underneath picnic tables before. They were pretty good places to hide.

A few minutes later, there was a crunch of gravel. Ethan peered out between the seat-bench and the tabletop and saw his father approaching. The wind had shifted again – there was no more whistling. Once again it was raining on Summerland. Ethan tried to ignore his father, who stood there, just breathing. His feet in their socks and sandals looked impossibly reasonable.

“What?” Ethan said at last.

“Come on, Ethan. We calmed Albert down. He’s all right.”

“So what?”

“Well. I thought you might want to help Jennifer T. She ran off. I guess she was upset about her dad and the way he was behaving. Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe she was just mad about getting called out. I was kind of hoping—”

“Excuse me? Mr. Feld? Are you Bruce Feld?”

Ethan poked his head out from under the table. A young man with longish hair was standing behind the car. He had on shorts, a flannel shirt, and sporty new hiking boots, but he was carrying a leather briefcase. His hair, swept back behind his ears, was so blond that it was white. He wore a pair of fancy skier’s sunglasses, white plastic with teardrop-shaped lenses that were at once black and iridescent.

“Yes?” Mr. Feld said.

“Oh, hey. Heh-heh. How’s it going? My name is Rob. Rob Padfoot? My company is called Brain + Storm Aerostatics, we’re into developing alternative and emerging dirigible technologies?”

Wow, Ethan thought. This was exactly the kind of person his father had been waiting to have show up. A guy with long hair and a briefcase. Somebody with money and enthusiasm who was also a little bit of a nut. It seemed to Ethan that in the past he had even heard his father use the phrase “alternative and emerging dirigible technologies”.

“Yes,” Dr. Feld repeated, looking a little impatient.

“Oh, well, I heard about your little prototype, there. Sweet. And I’ve read your papers on picofibre-envelope sheathing. So I thought I’d come up here and see if I could, heh-heh, catch a glimpse of the fabled beast, you know? And then, like,I’m driving around this gorgeous island and I look up in the sky and… and…”

“Look, Mr. Padfoot, I’m sorry, but I’m talking to my son right now.”

“Oh, uh, OK. Sure.” An expression of confusion crossed Rob Padfoot’s face. Ethan saw that his hair wasn’t blond at all but actually white. Ethan had read in books about young people whose hair went white. He wondered what unspeakable tragedy Rob Padfoot might have undergone to leach the colour from his hair. “Hey, but, heh, listen, let me give you my card. Call me, or e-mail. When you have the time.”

Ethan’s father took the card and stuck it in his pocket without looking at it. For an instant Rob Padfoot looked incredibly angry, almost as if he wanted to hit Mr. Feld. Then it was gone, and Ethan wasn’t sure if he had seen it at all.

“Dad?” he said, as Padfoot went slouching off, swinging his briefcase at his side.

“Forget it,” Mr. Feld said. He crouched down in the gravel beside the picnic table. “Now, come on. We have to find Jennifer T. I have a pretty good idea that you might know where she went.”

Ethan sat for a moment, then climbed out from under the table into the steady grey rain.

“Yeah,” he said. “Actually I sort of probably do.”

JENNIFER T. RIDEOUT had spent more time amid the ruins of the Summerland Hotel than any other child of her generation. It was a thirty-seven-minute hike, through woods, fields and the parking lot of the county dump, from the Rideout place to the beach. There was no road you could take to get you there; there had never been a road to the hotel. That was something she had always liked about the place. In the old days, her uncle Mo had told her, everything came to the hotel by steamship: food, linens, fine ladies and gentlemen, mail, musicians, fireworks on the Fourth of July. Though nowadays it was a popular spot for teenagers in the summer, on grey winter afternoons Hotel Beach could be pretty forlorn. As if in payment for the miracle of its summer sunshine, in the winter it was tormented by rain and fog, hailstorms, icy rain. Green stuff grew all over everything, this weird cross between algae and fungus and slime that settled like snow over the piles of drift and anything else that was made out of wood. On a damp, chilly winter afternoon she often found herself to be the only human being on the whole Tooth.

Another thing she liked, besides the solitude, were the stories. A boy from up by Kiwanis Beach wandered into one of the abandoned beach cabins at dusk and came out stark raving mad, having seen something he could never afterwards describe. Ghosts of the hotel dead, ghostly orchestras playing, phantoms doing the Lindy Hop in the light of the full moon. Sometimes people felt someone touching their cheek, pinching their arm, even giving them a kick in the seat of the pants. Girls had their skirts lifted, or found their hair tied in intractable knots. Jennifer T. didn’t necessarily believe these legends. But they gave Hotel Beach an atmosphere that she enjoyed. Jennifer T. Rideout believed in magic, maybe even more than Ethan did – otherwise she could not have been a part of this story. But she also believed that she had been born a hundred years too late to get even the faintest taste of it. Long ago there had been animals that talked, and strange little Indians who haunted the birch wood, while other Indians lived in villages on the bottom of the Sound. Now that world had all but vanished. Except on the ball field of Summerland, that is, and here at Hotel Beach.

So when Albert made an ass of himself in front of her team-mates, that was where she ran. But she saw, as soon as she got there, that something terrible had happened, and that all of the magic of the place was gone.

The clearing along the beach was crowded with bulldozers and earthmovers. They were carefully parked in three rows of three, next to a foreman’s trailer. She wondered how they could possibly have gotten there – by helicopter? Affixed to the side of the trailer was a large white sign that said TRANSFORM PROPERTIES and under this KEEP OUT. There were signs that said KEEP OUT everywhere, actually, as well as KEEP OFF, NO TRESPASSING, PRIVATE PROPERTY, and NO GATHERING MUSHROOMS. The cabins – there had been seven of them, in a shade of faded blue – were all gone. Now there were just seven rectangular dents in the ground. The tumbled remains of the great fieldstone porch of the hotel, the fortress, galleon and prison house of a million children’s games, had been packed up and carted off – somehow or other – leaving not a stone. And, God, they had cut down so many of the trees! The slim pale trunks of a hundred birch trees lay stacked in an orderly pile, like the contents of a giant box of pencils. The ends of each log had been flagged with strips of red plastic, ready to follow the porch and the cabins and the last ghosts of the Summerland Hotel into oblivion. With so many trees gone, you could see clear through to the dull grey glint of Tooth Inlet.