Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“Marty?” It was Ruby. “Everything all right in there?”

“Everything’s fine,” said Green. He took hold of his daughter’s hand and pressed it against his chest, over the breastbone.

“Feel that?” he said.

THE FARNHAM BUILDING STOOD on a hillside in the northwest corner of Portland, overlooking the Nob Hill district and the Willamette River, from 1938 until late last year, when an elderly electric blanket belonging to one of the building’s many elderly residents started a fire that killed six people and left the Farnham a whistling black skeleton in the center of a ring of rubble and ash. Fifteen stories tall, painted throughout the course of its existence a somber and unwavering shade of wintergreen, bearing more than a passing resemblance to a hospital tower, the Farnham never aspired to a landmark brand of beauty — it was just imposing enough to pass for stately, just Moderne enough to qualify as hip — but it had been home to a number of decrepit, rich widows and fashionable restaurateurs and interior designers, its lines and fenestration had a certain Bauhaus gravity, and its unusual color and prominent site lent it, in the esteem of Portlanders, some of the authority of a brilliant cathedral or a domed capitol. It was visible from all over town and from as far away as Vancouver, Washington, where one summer afternoon it was spotted by Eddie Zwang, a bankrupt optometrist in a Volvo station wagon who was at that moment crossing from Washington to Oregon on the I-5, headed for someplace like Mexico or Queen Maud Land, the hatch of his car filled with twenty thousand dollars’ worth of stolen optical equipment. His cheeks, as he drove, were already wet with tears, and a heavy muscle of sorrow pounded in his chest, and when he saw the cool, green Farnham rising from its lush hillside, he made a sudden, sentimental, and, under the circumstances, unwise decision to stop and say hello to Mrs. Horace Box, his ex-wife’s grandmother, who lived on its ninth floor, in Apartment G.

Eddie left the clamor of the freeway and plunged into the calm, alphabetical streets of Northwest, then headed west on Burnside, toward Willamette Heights. Although he had spent most of his adult life amid the vast, amorphous, pale cities of the West Coast, cities built in rain forests and bone deserts and on the shoulders of terrible mountains, he had been raised in the corroded redbrick river towns of the old Midwest — nine years in Pittsburgh, eight in Cleveland, college at Cincinnati — and he had always found great comfort in the modest hills, narrow streets, and rusty brown riverscape of Portland. He thought of it as a city in which painted advertisements for five-cent cigars faded from the sides of empty brick warehouses. He drove past the ballpark where he and Dolores had taken Oriole Box to watch her beloved Beavers lose baseball games, and past Midler’s, her favorite restaurant, and then, heart beating as in anticipation of a wild tryst, he turned into the street that led up the hill to the Farnham.

After Eddie nosed the Volvo into one of the visitors’ parking spaces, he got out and watched the street for any sign of the black LTD that had been following him, on and off, for the past two days. Its driver — Eddie had gotten a good look at him this morning on the ferry dock back at Southworth, on the Olympic Peninsula, where Eddie had made an unsuccessful attempt, in a deserted high school parking lot outside Sequim, to sell off some of the fancy Bausch & Lomb hardware he was carrying to a skittish medical-equipment fence with the improbable name of Seymour Lenz — was a florid man in a Sikh turban and a gray seersucker jacket, with sleepy eyes and a sharp black beard that jutted out from his face at a furious angle. The Sikh had been following him in the hope, Eddie imagined, of repossessing Eddie’s Volvo, although there were certainly a number of alternative explanations, upon which Eddie, who had suffered all his life from a debilitating tendency to hope for the best, didn’t care to dwell.

At this moment, however, there was nothing in the steep Portland street but the turbulence of light and air rising from the hot blacktop, and a pinch-faced young woman, dressed in a grimy parka and a red-and-black Trail Blazers ski cap, pushing uphill a broken baby stroller that she had filled with empty bottles and cola cans. Eddie was running away from so many disasters and errors of judgment, had left behind him so many injured parties, angry creditors, and broken hearts, that for an instant it occurred to him — a parka and a ski hat! in this heat! — to suspect the young woman of being somebody’s agent or repo man or spy. But of course she was only a crazy girl pushing and singing a lullaby to a stroller full of garbage; and Eddie felt sorry for her, and ashamed of himself for suspecting her. He had become paranoid — a thought that made him feel sorry, now, for himself. Then he bolted his steering wheel with a red Club lock and armed the Volvo’s alarm.

He entered the Farnham through the basement and rode up alone in the elevator, carrying in his left hand the neat leather briefcase, a birthday present from Dolores’s parents, that contained all the grim documents and bitter receipts of his financial and marital dismantlement, the importunities of the creditors of his failed practice, the sheet that divorced him from Dolores, as well as an expensive satellite-uplink telephone pager that had not uttered a beep for several months, a well-thumbed copy of the April issue of Cheri, and the remains of a three-day-old Deluxe hamburger from Dick’s, wrapped in a letter from the bankruptcy law firm of Yost, Daffler & Traut. He would have liked just to throw away the briefcase, but he had loved his former in-laws and he felt obliged to carry their last present to him everywhere he went, as if to make up for having managed to lose the other, more precious gift they had given him. Eddie sighed. It was hot in the moaning old elevator, and there was the smell of benzoin, rotten flowers, old women. His hair was slick with perspiration and his white oxford shirt clung to the small of his back. He was sorry he would not be looking his best for Oriole (she was particular about such things), but he had left his pastel neckties and fine madras blazers and white duck trousers behind him in Seattle, along with his wife and his livelihood and his optometrist’s faith in the ultimate correctability— Now, which is clearer: this? or this? — of everything. He hoped that the old woman would recognize him. It had been more than a year.

“Yes?” said Oriole, when she opened her door, peering at him through the narrow gap that the chain permitted. He could make out her thick eyeglasses and the little white cloud of her hair.

“It’s me, Gam,” said Eddie. “It’s Eddie.”

She stared at him, mouth open, eyes looking huge and crooked behind her half-inch lenses. She had on her blue summer housecoat and slippers. Her makeup, normally thickly applied, and her hair, normally arranged into a nice, round old-lady ’do, were uneven and haphazard. Neither Oriole nor he was looking too sharp, then, on this hot summer day. She surveyed him carefully, from his high forehead to his worn-heeled shoes, finally settling, it seemed, on the trim calfskin briefcase in his hand as the key to the mystery of his identity.

“I’m sorry, young man,” she said, her voice pleasant but cool and slightly wheezy, as though it were being produced by a ripped concertina. “I mustn’t talk to salesmen. My husband doesn’t approve of it one bit.”

“Gam, it’s Eddie. ” Eddie set down the briefcase. He swallowed. “ Dolores’s Eddie.”

“Oh, my.” Oriole looked worried. She knew that she ought to recognize him. She stroked the soft white down on her chin and gave it another try. “Did you call me?” she said.