Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“Lars Larssen? ” said Kohn. Kohn had read this same book, or one like it, as a child. “That’s your uncle Lars? Wow. Johnny Timberlake, wasn’t it?”

“Timberlake.”

“What happened to him after that?”

“He died!”

“I mean, your uncle. Did he have to go to jail, or anything?”

Bengt shook his head. “He had to retire, I guess was all,” he said. “It was a wild pitch. It was just bad luck.”

At the intersection of Cemetery Road and Chubb Island Highway they pulled up to the traffic signal, one of only two on the island. The light turned from green to yellow, and Kohn slowed the car to a stop. He looked over at Lars Larssen’s old spikes, with their reptile skin, their rats’ snouts, their laces like quivering feelers. Kohn would not have wanted to put his own feet inside them.

“I have to wear six pairs of socks,” said Bengt.

“Can’t you just buy new ones?”

Bengt didn’t immediately reply. He looked at the cursed shoes that were swallowing his feet, at the curling, scarred black toes of bad luck itself.

“I wish,” he said. There was more to it, his tone suggested, than lack of money. It seemed to have been impressed on him that these shoes were his inheritance.

In spite of Kohn’s fears, they arrived safely at practice. Kohn cut the engine, and they sat. They stared through the windshield at the men and boys gathered on the grass. The team practiced on the dirt-infield diamond behind Chagrin Harbor Elementary School, on the edge of a cow pasture frequented, autumn midnights, by the local island coven of shroomheads. The fathers were standing around in their baseball caps, in a knot, smoking and talking. They looked over at Kohn’s van, trying to identify it. Many of them would have known each other all their lives. On this field they would have tormented the chubby, bespectacled goat of their generation. Their sons sat clumped along the bench like pigeons on the arm of a statue. One boy stood off to one side, taking practice swings with a red aluminum bat, and two others were practicing some private martial art that involved kicking each other repeatedly in the behind. At last a tall, heavyset man separated himself from the group of fathers and approached the boys, clapping his hands. The men spread out behind him, arms folded across their chests, suddenly all business. The boys scrambled to their feet and went to string themselves out along the third base line.

“You’d better get going,” Kohn said, looking at his watch.

“I can’t,” said Bengt.

“Go on. You’ll be fine.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“Some other time,” Kohn said. “I’m serious, I really do have to see my lawyer.”

Bengt didn’t say anything. He affected to study the engineering of his fielder’s mitt, picking at its knots and laces. Kohn checked his watch again. He was already ten minutes late for his appointment.

“Who’s your lawyer?” Bengt said at last. “Mr. Crofoot? Mr. Toole? Ms. Banghart?”

“Ms. Banghart.”

Bengt nodded. “Are you making out your will?”

“Yes,” said Kohn. “And I’m leaving everything to you. Now, go on.”

Bengt looked down at his lap. His glasses started to slide off, but he caught them and pushed them back up his nose. His eyelids fluttered and he took a deep breath. Kohn was afraid he might start to cry. Then he opened the door. Before he got out of the car, he reached into the muff of his sweatshirt and took out a neat, tight roll of pennies. He handed it Kohn.

“I can get someone to bring me home,” he said. “Thank you for the ride.”

Kohn hesitated, but he felt that because of Bengt’s father, because of the fruitless nights the late Mr. Thorkelson had spent rolling stacks of coins as he drove the broken ice across the sea, he could not refuse payment. He took the pennies, then watched as Bengt, slow, hunched forward as if he were dragging some huge, cumbersome object, trudged over to join the other boys. Kohn put the pennies in his pocket and got out of the car.

The boys stood in a broken line along the base path between third and home, in bits and pieces of outgrown and hand-me-down uniforms, ripped jeans, dusty caps bearing the insignia of a dozen different major league teams, but all of them wearing complicated polychrome athletic shoes tricked out with lights, air pumps, windows, fins, ailerons, spoilers. They were skinny, mean-looking boys, scratch hitters and spikers of second basemen, dirt players, brushback artists. One of them was almost as tall as a man, with a faint pencil sketch of a mustache on his upper lip. They all stared at Bengt as he sidled up to the line. He was shorter than any of them, ten pounds heavier, and as he looked up at the coach he blushed, and gave an apologetic little laugh, which, amid that gang of tiny hard cases, came off inevitably as shrill and unbecoming. Standing with the other boys Bengt reminded Kohn of the leather button used in his family for many years to replace the shoe in Monopoly, ranged at Go alongside the race car, the top hat, and the scrappy little dog, plump and homely and still trailing a snippet of brown thread. When he saw Kohn he colored again, and looked down at his feet. This time his glasses fell off. They landed in the mud. A few of the boys laughed. Bengt picked them up and wiped the lenses on his sweatshirt.

“I guess now we know what happened to Joe Jackson’s shoes,” said a father, and all the men and boys laughed.

“Hello,” said the coach, walking over to Kohn, looking a little suspicious. “Glad you could make it. You must be …”

He held out his hand, waiting for Kohn to supply the explanation, the narrative that would plausibly connect him to Bengt Thorkelson.

“I’m just a neighbor,” Kohn said.

“Hey, that’s okay,” the coach said. He was a large man, rubicund in the face, hard and fat in the Boog Powell style. A pure pull hitter. He forced his genial features onto a grid of seriousness, and looked at Bengt, who was looking down at his uncle’s shoes. “We understand.”

Kohn was handed third base, a heavy mysterious parcel, and stepped out onto a ball field for the first time in ten years. It was not much of a field; mangy, pebbly, two-thirds-sized, with the hulk of a commercial henhouse collapsing in the field on the other side of the fence in deep right. But the dirt was a rich brown, the color of fir-tree bark, and where there was grass it was thick and spongy and freshly cut. Bengt led him to the square pipe buried in the dirt at the hot corner, and they tamped the pegged base down into it. The boy kicked at the base, circled it, then climbed up onto it and kicked at it again, affecting the taut air of a base runner stranded at third, waiting for somebody to hit one, anything, a blooper, a cheap little broken-bat single.

“I’ve never been on third before,” he said presently.

“It’s nice,” Kohn said.

“It’s not bad,” said Bengt. He looked at his watch, black plastic with a liquid-crystal face. “Don’t you have to go?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But you can’t stay, can you?”

“I’d better not.”

“They don’t really do anything,” Bengt said. “Mostly they just stand around talking.”

“That doesn’t sound too tough,” Kohn said. “I could probably manage that.”

For the first ten minutes the coach had the boys stretch, alternate crunches with push-ups, and focus their mental energies, since the key to good baseball, in spite of what they might have seen or observed, was mental effort. All of the fathers appeared relieved to be exempted from this portion of the proceedings. They stood around behind home plate, smoking, leaning against the backstop. Then when practice began — ball tossing, bunting and base-running exercises, followed by an intrasquad game — the men, as Bengt had suggested, mostly stayed put. From time to time they exhorted their sons, or teased them, not always kindly. The boys made a study of ignoring the men and the things they said. And yet Kohn felt that the presence of their fathers on the other side of the chain-link backstop was as indispensable to them as bats, dirt, spikes, grass, the reliable pain of a baseball smacking against the heels of their mitts. If a boy’s father somehow missed a play, a nice catch, a bunt laid down stiff and inflexible as rebar, the boy acted quite put out.