Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“Shit. I mean, shoot.” He picked the penny up, tossed it, and took another swing. He missed again. “Shoot.” He tossed the penny and swung wild again. “Shoot!” He glanced toward Kohn, then away, his cheeks reddening. “I can hit it,” he assured Kohn. He pointed, and Kohn saw that the ground before him was sprinkled lightly with pennies.

“You have a game today?” said Kohn. He had spoken to no one but his lawyer in days, and the bassoon twang of his voice struck his ears oddly. He unzipped his hood a little.

“No, I have practice. Today’s the first day.”

“In the rain?”

“It’s not raining.” Kohn guessed that he was right; it had rained all winter, every day but January 11 and February 24, from early December to mid-March, a magical-realist deluge that made fence posts sprout green leaves and restored Chubb Lake, lost thirty years earlier to a failed Army Corps of Engineers drainage project. This spring weather was something different, hardly weather at all — a thin, drifting blanket of sparkling grayness that would not prevent islanders from mowing their lawns, washing their cars, or working on their home-run swings. Again Bengt tossed the elusive cent into the air. This time he connected, and the coin chimed an E-flat against the tube. It hooked foul, toward the Civic, ricocheted, and landed in the mud ten feet from Bengt’s shoes, leaving a white scar in the blue flank of the car. “Yes!” he cried grimly. He reached into his pocket, fished around, and brought out another penny. “I suck.”

“Pennies are small.”

“Baseballs are small, too,” Bengt observed. He probed at the mud with the end of his pipe. “I’d like to shoot a crossbow one time,” he went on irrelevantly. He operated an invisible crank, took aim along the stock of his PVC pipe, and then let a bolt fly with a thwok! of his tongue. He looked down at his feet. “These shoes were my uncle Lars’s. I know they’re stupid-looking.”

“No,” said Kohn. “Not really.” Kohn looked at his wristwatch. A few seconds later he looked at it again. Lately he was always checking his watch, but the next moment he never seemed to remember what it had told him.

“Huh,” said Bengt finally. “Well, okay. I’m late now. I guess I must be pretty late. I guess I might as well not go. I hate baseball.” He glanced up at Kohn, then away, looking to see if he had shocked Kohn. Kohn tried to look shocked. “I’m much more interested in archery.”

“Is your mom driving you?”

“She’s with my gran in the hospital. She fell off a step stool in the kitchen, my gran I mean, and broke her hip. My uncle Lars is staying with me supposally but I don’t know where he is. I called Tommy Latrobe and his dad is supposed to come over to pick me up. But I guess they forgot.”

Bengt tossed a penny and connected again, pulling it to the left but keeping it more or less fair this time. Then he dug down into his pocket again.

“You sure have a lot of pennies in there,” Kohn said.

Bengt brought out a handful of fifty-cent penny rolls, in crisp, tight, red-and-white wrappers. He held them out for Kohn to inspect, then slipped all but one back into his pocket. From this one he peeled down a quarter-inch of wrapper, and loosened another handful of coins.

“They were my dad’s,” he said. “My mom said he used to have a lot of time on his hands. On the boats.” The Chubb Island Thorkelsons ran an outfit that went up to Alaska, rounded up ice floes, and drove them to Japan, where they were sold, suitably shaved and crushed, in elegant bars. Wondrous the things a Japanese person would buy. “There’s a whole box of penny rolls under my mom’s bed.” He tossed a penny, swung, and drove it toward the ivy-or vinyl-covered wall of his imagination.

“Don’t hit them into the mud!” Kohn was appalled. “Your father’s pennies!”

“I don’t need them.”

Bengt pressed another penny between his thumb and forefinger and tossed it into the air. He brandished the length of pipe and reached back to take his hack. Kohn reached out and grabbed hold of his wrist and cupped the spinning penny like a moth. The boy looked at him, astonished. He wrenched his hand away and gave it a shake. His arm bore briefly the pale impression of Kohn’s fingers.

“Oh, my God, I’m sorry,” said Kohn, surprised by himself. They were only pennies. They rolled under the refrigerators of the world, wedged themselves into the joints of desk drawers, disappeared into the bowels of auto seats, slipped behind breakfronts, bureaus, and toilets. No one bothered to fish them out. They fell from the hands of careless pedestrians and lay for hours on the sidewalk without anyone stopping to pick them up. Kohn himself had tossed ringing handfuls into the garbage. “Did I hurt you? God, I’m sorry. Let me give you a ride to practice. I’m on my way into town.”

Bengt studied Kohn, his forehead wrinkling. He checked Kohn’s adequate build. He appraised Kohn’s knotted, strong-looking hands. “Do you like baseball?” he said.

Kohn considered the question. He had first come to the game at the age of eight, in Washington, D.C., and had fallen in love with Frank Howard, but at the end of the season Howard and the Senators had departed for Texas. That November, his parents had ended their own marriage. The candy manufacturer for whom Mr. Kohn worked as an accountant transferred him to Pittsburgh. After a nasty legal battle the young Kohn went with him. The following spring his father took him many times down to the big ugly ballpark at the Confluence. The Pirates had a handsome Puerto Rican outfielder who hit in the clutch and cut down runners at the plate with strikes from deep right. He collected his three thousandth career hit on the last day of the season, and died the following winter in a plane crash. After that Kohn gave up on the organized versions of the sport.

He shook his head. “To be honest I kind of hate it, too.”

“I know,” said Bengt, banging the ground with the end of his pipe. “God!”

“But I play a little softball sometimes.” Kohn had played on an intramural team in college. He had been the second-worst player on a team that finished in ninth place out of twelve.

Bengt looked a little surprised. “What position?”

“Outfield.” Kohn had a sudden craving for the broad skewed vista from far right, the distant buzz of chatter from the bench, the outfielder's blank bovine consciousness of grass and sky. If you backed up far enough out there on a hot summer day you could sometimes see the curvature of the earth. “Mostly left.”

“Do you have a glove?” Bengt was getting a little excited now.

“Somewhere in my van, I think.”

“Cool,” said Bengt. He dropped the piece of pipe, picked up his own mitt, and started toward Kohn’s van, cleats spraying clodlets of mud as he went. Kohn trudged after him. When he climbed in behind the wheel he saw to his dismay that the boy was smiling.

“I have to go see my lawyer,” Kohn said. “Did I mention that?”

Ordinarily Kohn drove the island roads with unstudied recklessness. His work demanded that hours of intense care be paid to very small things and when he got behind the wheel of a car he always came a little unwound. But he drove his twitchy, voluble young passenger toward town carefully and slowly. He worked at it. He was doing a good deed and a part of him was afraid of doing good deeds. They often seemed to result, he had noticed, in tragedy and newspaper articles. A kindly, heartbroken neighbor drives a troubled young fatherless boy to his baseball practice. Their van flips over and bursts into flames.

“My uncle Lars is like eighty years old,” Bengt was saying, warily watching his shoes. “He played for the St. Louis Browns. He was the pitcher who killed somebody, you know? With a baseball, I mean, in a game. Johnny something, I don’t remember. It was in a book. Strange but true baseball stories.”