Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

Harris was accustomed to having his disposition discussed and his fate decided, in his presence, by other people; it was part of that same mysterious alchemy that could transmute his body into cash and of the somewhat less obscure process that had sent him to Ellensburg for nineteen months. But at the mention of cable television, he could not restrain himself.

“What is it?” he said. “What opportunity?” Oly reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a manila envelope, folded in half. He took a color brochure from the envelope and handed it to Harris. Harris sat down on the bed to read. It was a prospectus designed to attract investors to a league that would feature a sport that the brochure called Powerball, “the first new major American sport in a hundred years,” to be played in every major city in the United States, apparently by men in garish uniforms that were part samurai armor and part costume de ballet, one of whom was depicted, on the airbrushed cover of the brochure, swinging across the playing arena from a striped rappelling cable. The description was vague, but, as far as Harris could tell, Powerball appeared to be an amalgam of rugby, professional wrestling, and old pirate movies. It was not football or anything close to football. Once Harris realized this, he skimmed through such phrases as “speed, drama, and intense physical action … the best elements of today’s most popular sports … our proposed partnership with the Wrestling Channel … all the elements are in place … revolutionary, popular, and, above all, profitable …” until he turned to the last page and found a photograph of his father beside a caption that identified him as “coaching great Norm Fetko, inventor of Powerball, part owner and coach of the Seattle franchise.”

“Fetko invented this crap?” said Harris, tossing the brochure onto the floor.

“It came to him in a dream,” said Oly, looking solemn. He raised his hands to his eyes and spread his thick fingers, watching the air between them as it shimmered with another one of Norm Fetko’s lunatic visions. “A guy … with a football under his arm … swinging from a rope.” Oly shook his head as if awestruck by the glimpse Harris’s father had vouchsafed him into the mystic origins of the future of American sport. “This will be big, Harris. We already have a line on investors in nine cities. Our lawyers are working out the last few kinks in the TV contract. This could be a very, very big thing.”

“Big,” said Harris. “Yeah, I get it now.” For he saw, with admiration and to his horror, that at this late stage of his career Fetko had managed to come up with yet another way to ruin the lives and fortunes of hapless elevens of men. None of Fetko’s other failures — his golf resort out in the Banana Belt of Washington, his “revolutionary” orange football, his brief (pioneering, in retrospect) foray into politics as a candidate with no political convictions, his attempt to breed and raise the greatest quarterback the world would ever see — had operated in isolation. They had all roped in, ridden on the backs of, and ultimately broken a large number of other people. And around all of Fetko’s dealings and misdealings, Oly Olafsen had hovered, loving sidekick, pouring his money down Fetko’s throat like liquor. “That’s why he called. He wants me to play for him again.”

“Imagine the media, Harris, my gosh,” said Oly. “Norm and Harris Fetko reunited, that would sell a few tickets.”

Lou winced and sat down on the bed next to Harris. He put his hand on Harris’s shoulder. “Harris, you don’t want to do this.”

“No kidding,” said Harris. “Oly,” he said to Oly. “I hate my father. I don’t want to have anything to do with him. Or you. You guys all fucked me over once.”

“Hey, now, kid.” Another crack of grief opened in the glacial expanse of his face. “Look, you hate me, that’s one thing, but I know you don’t—”

“I hate him!”

Inside Harris Fetko the frontier between petulance and rage was generally left unguarded, and he crossed it now without slowing down. He stood up and went for Oly, wondering if somewhere in the tiny interval between the big man’s jaw and shoulders he might find a larynx to get his thumbs around. Oly started to rise, but his shattered knees slowed him, and before he could regain his feet, Harris had kicked the tiny chair out from under him. A sharp pain went whistling up Harris’s shin, and then his foot began to throb like a trumpet. The right foreleg of the wooden chair splintered from the frame, the chair tipped, and Oly Olafsen hit the flecked aquamarine carpet. His impact was at once loud and muffled, like the collision of a baseball bat and a suitcase filled with water.

“I’m sorry,” Harris said.

Oly looked up at him. His meaty fingers wrapped around the broken chair leg and clenched it. His breath blew through his nostrils as loud as a horse’s. Then he let go of the chair leg and shrugged. When Harris offered a hand, Oly took it.

“I just want to tell you something, Harris,” he said, smoothing down his sleeves. He winched up his trousers by the belt, then attended to the tectonic slippage of the shoulder pads in his jacket. “Everything the coach has, okay, is tied up in this thing. Not money. The coach doesn’t have any money. So far the money is mostly coming from me.” With a groan he stooped to retrieve the fallen brochure, then slipped it back into its envelope. “What the coach has tied up in this thing, it can’t be paid back or defaulted on or covered by a bridge loan.” He tapped the rolled manila envelope against the center of his chest. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“No, you will not,” said Harris as Oly went out. He tried to sound as though he were not in terrible pain. “I’m not going.”

Lou lifted Harris’s foot and bent the big toe experimentally. Harris groaned. A tear rolled down his cheek.

“You broke it,” said Lou. “Aw, Harris.”

“I’m sorry, Coach,” said Harris, falling backward on the bed. “Fucking Fetko, man. It’s all his fault.”

“Everything else, maybe it was Fetko’s fault,” said Lou, though he sounded doubtful. He picked up the telephone and asked room service to bring up a bucket of ice. “This was your fault.”

When the ice came, he filled a towel with it and held it against Harris’s toe for an hour until the swelling had gone down. Then he taped the big toe to its neighbor, patted Harris on the head, and went back to his room to revise the playbook for tomorrow. Before he went out, he turned.

“Harris,” he said, “you’ve never confided in me. And you’ve never particularly followed any of the copious advice I’ve been so generous as to offer you over the last few months.”

“Coach—”

“But regardless of that, I’m foolishly going to make one last little try.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on a rumpled shirttail. “I think you ought to go to that thing tomorrow.” He put his glasses back on again and blinked his eyes. “It’s your brother that’ll be lying there with his little legs spread.”

“Fuck the little bastard,” said Harris, with the easy and good-natured callousness that, like so much about the game of football, had always come so naturally to him. “I hope they slice the fucking thing clean off.”

Lou went out, shaking his big, sorrowful head. Ten minutes later there was another knock at the door. This time it was not a lady mortgage broker but a reporter for the Morning News Tribune come to poke around in the embers of the Harris Fetko conflagration. Harris lay on the bed with his foot in an ice pack and told, once again, the sorry tale of how his father had ruined his life and made him into all the sad things he was today. When the reporter asked him what had happened to his foot and the chair, Harris said that he had tripped while running to answer the phone.