Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“We need to talk.” Lou sat down on the bed and studied Harris. His watery brown eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were beautiful in a way that suited his losing record. “You called your PO?”

“I left a message.”

“Aren’t you supposed to see him in person when you’re home?”

“I’m not home,” said Harris. “Technically. My home is Seattle. We’re in Tacoma. ”

“Technically,” said Lou. “A word much beloved of fuckups.”

“Something to drink?” Harris went to the minibar. There was nothing in it except for a rattling ice tray and a ghostly smell of caulk. The minibars were always empty in Luxington Parcs and in most of the other hotels the Regina Kings patronized. Often they were not even plugged in. “I’m supposed to have six bottles of mineral water,” Harris said. He tried not to sound petulant, but it was difficult, because he was feeling petulant.

“Aw,” said Lou.

“I’m sick of this!” Harris slammed the refrigerator door shut. “Every fucking time I walk into my room and open the minibar door, there’s supposed to be six fucking bottles of mineral water in there.” The slammed door rebounded and bashed into the wall beside the minibar. Its handle gouged a deep hole in the wallboard. Crumbs of plaster spattered the floor. Harris ran his fingers along the edges of the hole he had made in the wall. A feeling of remorse took wing in his chest, but with an old, sure instinct, he caught it and neatly twisted its neck. He turned to Lou, trying to look certain of himself and his position. The truth was that Harris didn’t even like mineral water; he thought it tasted like saliva. But it was in his contract. “So, okay, talk. It’s past my bedtime.”

“Harris, in a minute or two there’s someone coming up here with a proposition for you.” Just as he said this, there was another knock at the door. Harris jumped. “He wants to offer you a job.”

“I already have a job.”

Lou turned up the corners of his mouth but somehow failed to produce a viable smile.

“Lou,” said Harris, and his heart started to pound. “Please tell me the league isn’t folding.”

There had been rumors to this effect since before the season even began; attendance at games in all but a few sports-starved cities was declining by a thousand or more every weekend, the owner of the Portland team had been murdered by Las Vegas wiseguys, and the Vancouver bank on whose line of credit the NAPIFL depended for its operating costs was under investigation by the government of Canada.

Lou stroked the bedspread, smoothing it, watching the back of his hand.

“I just want to play out the schedule,” he said sadly. “I could be happy with that.”

“Harris?” said a man on the other side of the door. “You there?”

Harris put on his jeans and went to the door.

“Oly,” he said. He took a step back into the room. The man at the door was enormous, six feet eight inches tall, just shy of three hundred pounds. Like Norm Fetko a member of the 1955 national champions and — unlike Fetko — a successful businessman, purveyor of a popular topical analgesic, Oly Olafsen had always been the biggest man Harris knew, a chunk of the northern ice cap, a piece of masonry, fifteen tons of stone, oak, and gristle supporting eight cubic inches of grinning blond head. He wore silver aviator eyeglasses and a custom-tailored suit, metallic gray, so large and oddly proportioned that it was nearly unrecognizable as an article of human clothing and appeared rather to have been designed to straiten an obstreperous circus elephant or to keep the dust off some big, delicate piece of medical imaging technology.

“How’s my boy?” said Oly.

It had been Oly Olafsen’s money, more or less, that Harris had used, more or less without Oly’s knowing about it, to purchase the pound of cocaine the police had found under the rear bench of Harris’s 300ZX when they pulled him over that night on Ravenna Avenue. He gave Harris’s hand a squeeze that compressed the very bones.

“So,” he went on, “the coach has got himself another son after all these years. That’s a thought, isn’t it? Wonder what he’s got cooked up for this one.”

This remark angered Harris, whom the sporting world for two hectic and disappointing collegiate seasons had known as Frankenback. Among the failings of his character exposed during that time was a total inability to stand up to teasing about any aspect of his life, his father’s experimentation least of all. With a great effort and out of an old habit of deference to his father’s cronies, he got himself to smile, then realized that Oly wasn’t teasing him at all. On the contrary, there had been in Oly’s soft voice a disloyal wrinkle of concern for the fate, at his great idol’s hands, of the latest little Fetko to enter the world.

“Yeah, he asked me out to the showroom tomorrow,” Harris said. “To the thing where they, what’s that, circumcise the kid.”

“Are you people Jewish?” said Lou, surprised. “I didn’t know.”

“We’re not. Fetko isn’t. I guess his new wife must be.”

“I’ll be there. Ah!” Gingerly — his knees were an ancient ruin of cartilage and wire — Oly lowered himself into the desk chair, which creaked in apparent horror at the slow approach of his massive behind. “As a matter of fact, I’m paying for the darn thing.” Oly smiled, then took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. When he put the glasses back on, he wasn’t smiling anymore. “The coach has got himself into a little bit of a tight spot out there in Northgate,” he said, pressing his palms together as if they represented the terrific forces that were putting the squeeze on Fetko. “I know things haven’t been, well, the greatest between you two since … everything that happened, but the coach — Harris, he’s really putting his life back together. He’s not—”

“Get to the point,” said Harris.

An odd expression came over Oly’s generally peaceful and immobile face. His eyebrows reached out to each other over the bridge of his nose, and his tiny, pale lips compressed into a pout. He was unhappy, possibly even actively sad. Harris had never imagined that Oly might ever be feeling anything but hunger and gravitation.

“Harris, I’m not going to lie to you, the old man could really use a little help,” said Oly. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. I don’t know if Lou has mentioned it, but the coach and I—”

“I told him,” said Lou. “Harris isn’t interested.”

“Isn’t he?” Oly looked at Lou, his face once again a region of blankness, his eyes polite and twinkling. He had pleasant, vacant little eyes that, along with his bulk and a recipe purchased in 1963 from a long-dead Chinese herbalist in the International District for $250, had enabled him to do what was necessary to make Power Rub the number-three topical analgesic in the western United States. “Somebody might think he would be very interested in finding another job, seeing as how this outfit of yours is about to go belly-up.” He turned his flashbulb eyes toward Harris now. “Seeing as how what they call gainful employment is a condition of his parole.”

“If that happens, and I don’t personally feel that it will, Harris can find another job. He doesn’t need any help from you.”

“What is he going to do? He doesn’t know how to do anything but be a quarterback! It’s in his genes, it’s in his blood particles. It’s wired into his darn brain. No, I figure he has to be very interested in hearing about an opportunity like this. A chance to actually redefine the position, at twice his present salary, in front of a guaranteed national cable audience of forty-four million homes. ”