Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“You did?” Oriole was saying. “Well, and I’m sure you got a good price for it. It’s such a darling house.”

Dolores; their house in Juanita had been on the market for months. She hadn’t wanted to sell it, but Eddie needed the cash, and on her gym teacher’s salary she’d had no way of buying him out. A part of him was anxious to find out how much Dolores had gotten for the house, but just now that part seemed a small one, with a weak and ineffectual voice in the council of his heart.

Just as he understood that he really did belong in the morass of debt and hopelessness in which he had become mired, he looked down, into the Farnham’s parking lot, and saw that the familiar black LTD, gleaming orange in the halogen light of the parking lot, had pulled up alongside his Volvo station wagon. Eddie reached for the Zeiss binoculars and watched, with a bleak fascination, as the man in the turban climbed out of the passenger side of the long black car, accompanied by the woman in the red-and-black ski hat. The Sikh went around to force the lock on the Volvo’s door, and if the alarm went off, Eddie couldn’t hear it. In another moment the man with the angry beard had disengaged the Club lock (Eddie had heard you could freeze them brittle with a squirt of Freon, then shatter them with a gentle tap), hot-wired the engine, and driven off in Eddie’s car, taking with him all of Eddie’s stolen equipment — his slit lamp, Phoroptor, tonometer, ophthalmoscope — and his clothing and legal documents, his Al Hibbler records, his photographs of Dolores.

Eddie didn’t move. He felt as though he himself had been blasted with a paralyzing dose of some cold, cold gas.

“Now tell me,” said Oriole, to the abandoned woman on the other end of the line. “How’s that darling husband of yours?”

ONE AFTERNOON TOWARD the middle of April, Kohn’s lawyer, her patience exhausted, called and said she was giving him one last chance. He was to come into Chagrin Harbor that afternoon and sign the petition in which he and his wife informed the state of Washington that their marriage was irretrievably broken. If he once again failed to show, his lawyer regretted she would have to toss his file into a bottom drawer, send him a bill, and forget about him. His wife, and her lawyer, would then be free to reap uncontested the rewards of his recalcitrance. So Kohn pulled on his big rubber boots and slogged up the path to the slough of gravel where he and his neighbors on Valhalla Beach parked their mud-encrusted Jeeps and pickups. There was a chill in the air, and Kohn’s large, unshaven head with its spectacles and stunned features was zipped deep into the hood of a parka the vague color of boiled organ meat. He peered out at the world through a tiny porthole trimmed with synthetic fur and heard only the sound of his own respiration.

His marriage had been short-lived, a brief tale of blind hopefulness, calamity, and then the dismantling ministrations of psychotherapists and lawyers. Jill was ten years older than Kohn, a Chubb Island native, a Lacan scholar who taught at Reed College. She yearned to have a child. Kohn was an Easterner, socially awkward, obsessive. He was an instrument maker who built custom electric guitars, mostly for the Japanese market, and he preferred to keep his own yearnings pressed between the clear panes of a marijuana habit where he could safely observe them. He spoke with a slight stammer. His only good friend was one he had made in his freshman year of high school. Jill had mistaken his carpenterial silences, and a shyness that was purely physiological, for the marks of a sensitive soul. She was thirty-five and perhaps not interested in looking too closely or too far.

She had gotten pregnant right after the wedding. They left Portland and moved back up to the Puget Sound, to her parents’ old brown-shingled house on Probity Beach. The baby, a son, arrived in March, and for the length of a baseball season the three of them were contented, in a blurred way that at certain moments resolved itself into sharp foci of happiness no wider than a dime, no more substantial than a smell of salt in the hollow of the baby’s neck as Kohn carried him up the beach to his grandparents’ whitewashed porch. In October, the baby spiked a fever of 106°. He lost consciousness on the ferryboat, in his mother’s arms, on the way into Swedish Hospital. He was buried, along with his parents’ marriage, in a corner of Chubb Island Cemetery, with some of his ancestors and cousins. They got therapy, but it was a waste of money and time because Kohn didn’t like to talk in front of the therapist. He grieved at odd moments, privately, minutely, invisibly almost even to himself. He did not, it was certainly true, grieve enough. He withdrew. Jill left him. She left the island and moved to a Siddha Yoga ashram, a former hotel in the Catskill Mountains once patronized by Kohn’s great-grandparents. She would never completely recover, Kohn knew, from what had happened, but complete recovery was probably not necessary. At least she had managed to put some solid geographical distance between herself and their disaster. It was as if she had been blown clear, while Kohn continued to camp, snowbound, on the steaming wreckage. He had moved out of her parents’ house, rented the tiny cabin on Valhalla Beach, set up his workbench, and resumed the slow production of his signature model, the Kohn Six, a flying wedge of flamed maple with locking tremolo and tuners and deluxe hum-bucking pickups with coil taps. He waited for the next intervention of fate, hoping this time to miss it when it came.

When Kohn reached the muddy parking area, out of breath from the climb, he saw Bengt Thorkelson standing in the rain beside his mother’s Honda Civic, with a length of PVC pipe, swinging for the fences.

Bengt was eleven years old and lived with his widowed mother in the Wayland house, three doors down the beach from Kohn. He was short for his age, and pudgy, with wiry dark hair and big eyeglasses. He ran with a slight wobble in his hips. On the beach at dusk, when he thought no one was looking, he practiced seagull impersonation, with some success. His best friend, Malcolm Dorsey, was currently the only black child on Chubb Island. That was all Kohn knew about him, except that walking on the beach one stoned morning the winter before, Kohn had come upon Bengt sitting on a driftwood log, in the rain, with his orange Lab mongrel Nerf, holding a polka-dot Minnie Mouse umbrella over both their heads, and sobbing. Kohn had hurried past him, head down, zipped tight into his parka. The boy’s father, Kohn knew vaguely, had drowned or somehow been killed at sea. His mother was a buxom, energetic, foul-mouthed, kind of sexy woman who had once brought Kohn a strange casserole involving tofu, buckwheat noodles, and currants. Kohn avoided her, too. He kept his distance from all his neighbors, whose lives extended across Chubb Island from Valhalla Beach to Rhododendron Beach, from Chagrin Harbor to Point Probity, from the tops of the transmitter towers along Radio Beach down to the deep Cretaceous bones of the island. Kohn’s life fit into the back of an Econoline van.

“Hi, Bengt,” Kohn said, moving slowly toward his van, the mud sucking in and spitting out the soles of his boots as he went. He was never comfortable saying the boy’s name, which must be the curse of his entire existence. Generally he veered between leaving off the t and trying to slip in as much of the g as he felt Swedish custom would allow.

“Hi, Mr. Kohn,” Bengt said glumly. He crouched and picked up a penny from the ground by his feet. He was dressed in a bright red-and-white hooded sweatshirt that said RANGERS in blue script across the chest, stiff new dungarees, rolled, and a pair of ancient, pointy men’s cleats, tied with dress laces, much too large for his feet and apparently a hand-me-down from some remote ball-playing ancestor. A brand-new fielder’s glove lay on the ground at his feet. His fingers on the length of plastic pipe were pink with cold. He rocked back on his heels, raised the pipe like a hatchet behind his head, and tossed the penny into the air. Then he swung, as Kohn had seen him swing before, putting everything he had into a huge, wild hack that spun him around so far he almost fell over. The penny hit the mud with a splatter of rude commentary on his form.