Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

They beat Tacoma 10-9, on a field goal in the last eight seconds of the game. Harris scrambled for the touchdown, kicked the extra point with his off foot, and then, when in the last minute of the game it became clear that none of the aging farm implements and large pieces of antique cabinetry who made up his backfield and receiving corps were going to manage to get the ball into the end zone, he himself, again with his left foot, nailed the last three points needed to keep them happy for one more day back in Regina.

When the team came off the field, they found the Kings’ owner, Irwin Selwyn, waiting in the locker room, holding an unlit cigar in one hand and a pale blue envelope in the other, looking at his two-tone loafers. The men from the front office stood around him, working their Adam’s apples up and down over the knots of their neckties. Selwyn had on blue jeans and a big yellow sweater with the word KINGS knit across it in blue. He stuck the cigar between his teeth, opened the blue envelope, and unfolded the letter from the league office, which with terse, unintentional elegance regretfully informed the teams and players of the NAPIFL that the standings at the end of that day’s schedule of games would be duly entered into the record books as final. Lou Sammartino, having coached his team to first place in its division and the best record in the league, wandered off into the showers and sat down. Irwin Selwyn shook everyone’s hand and had his secretary give each player a set of fancy wrenches (he owned a hardware chain) and a check for what the player would have been owed had Lou Sammartino been granted his only remaining desire. Shortly thereafter, twenty-five broken giants trudged out to the parking lot with their socket wrenches and caught the bus to the rest of their lives.

Harris went back to his room at the Luxington Parc, turned on the television, and watched a half-hour commercial for a handheld vacuum device that sheared the bellies of beds and sofas of their eternal wool of dust. He washed his underpants in the sink. He drank two cans of diet root beer and ate seven Slim Jims. Then he switched off the television, pulled a pillow over his head, and cried. The serene, arctic blankness with which he was rumored, and in fact did struggle, to invest all his conscious processes of thought was only a hollow illusion. He was racked by that particular dread of the future that plagues superseded deities and washed-up backs. He saw himself carrying an evening six-pack up to his rented room, wearing slacks and a name tag at some job, standing with the rest of the failures of the world at the back of a very long line, waiting to claim something that in the end would turn out to be an empty tin bowl with his own grinning skull reflected in its bottom. He went into the bathroom and threw up.

When he reemerged from the bathroom, the queasiness was gone but the dread of his future remained. He picked up the phone and called around town until he found himself a car. His tight end, a Tacoma native, agreed, for a price they finally fixed at seventeen dollars — seventeen having been the number on the tight end’s 1979 Washington State Prep Championship jersey — to bring his brother’s car around to the hotel in half an hour. Harris showered, changed into a tan poplin suit, seersucker shirt, and madras tie, and checked out of his room. When he walked out of the Luxington Parc, he found a 1979 Chevrolet Impala, eggplant with a white vinyl top, waiting for him under the porte cochere.

“Don’t turn the wipers on,” said Deloyd White. “It blows the fuse on the radio. Be honest, it blows a lot of fuses. Most of them.”

“What if it rains?”

Deloyd looked out at the afternoon, damp and not quite warm, the blue sky wan and smeary. He scratched at the thin, briery tangle of beard on his chin.

“If it rains you just got to drive really fast,” he said.

As Harris drove north on I-5, he watched nervously as the cloak of blue sky grew threadbare and began to show, in places, its eternal gray interfacing of clouds. But the rain held off, and Harris was able to make it all the way out to Northgate without breaking the speed laws. The Chevy made a grand total of seven cars parked on the lot of Norm Fetko’s New and Used Buick-Isuzu, an establishment that had changed hands and product lines a dozen times since Pierce Arrow days. It sat, a showroom of peeling white stucco, vaguely art deco, next to a low cinder-block garage on one of the saddest miles of Aurora Avenue, between a gun shop and a place that sold grow lights. Fetko had bought the place from a dealer in Pacers and Gremlins, banking on his local celebrity to win him customers at the very instant in history when Americans ceased to care who it was that sold them their cars. Harris pulled in between two Le Sabres with big white digits soaped onto their windshields, straightened his tie, and started for the open door of the dealership.

A tall, fair-haired salesman, one of the constantly shifting roster of former third-stringers and practice dummies Fetko could always call upon to man the oars of his argosies as they coursed ever nearer to the maelstrom, was propped against the doorway, smoking a cigarette, as Harris walked up. He was stuffed imperfectly into his cheap suit, and his face looked puffy. He lounged with a coiled air of impatience, tipping and rocking on the balls of his feet. His hair was like gold floss.

“Hey, Junior,” he said. He gestured with a thumb. “They’re all in the back room.”

“Did they do it already?”

“I don’t think so. I think they were waiting for you.”

“But I said I wasn’t going to come,” said Harris, irritated to find that his change of heart had come as a surprise only to him.

He walked across the showroom, past three metal desks, three filing cabinets, and three wastebaskets, all enameled in a cheery shade of surgical glove; three beige telephones with rotary dials; a dismantled mimeograph; and an oak hat rack that was missing all of its hooks but one, from which there hung an empty plastic grocery sack. There was no stock on the floor, a bare beige linoleum expanse layered with a composite detritus of old cigarette ash and the lost limbs of insects. The desk chairs were tucked neatly under the desks, and the desktops themselves were bare of everything but dust. Aside from a bookshelf filled with the binders and thick manuals of the automobile trade and a few posters of last season’s new models tacked up amid black-and-white photographs of the owner, in his glory days, fading back to pass, there was little to suggest that Norm Fetko’s New and Used was not a defunct concern and had not been so for a very long time.

“I knew you’d come,” said Fetko’s wife, hurrying across the back room to greet him. She was not at all what he had imagined — an ample, youngish bottle blonde with an unlikely suntan and the soft, wide-eyed look, implying a certain preparedness to accept necessary pain, that Fetko had favored in all the women he had gotten involved with after Harris’s mother. She was small, with thin arms and a skinny neck, her hair like black excelsior. Her eyes were deep set. She was certainly no younger than forty. Her name was Marilyn Levine.

“I almost didn’t,” he insisted. “I’m, uh, not too wild about … these things.”

“Have you been to a bris before?”

Harris shook his head.

“I’m not even going to be in the room,” Marilyn said. “That’s what a lightweight I am.” She was wearing a loose burgundy velvet dress and ballet shoes. This was another surprise. Over time, most of the women in Fetko’s life allowed themselves to become, as it were, themed, favoring grass-green muumuus patterned with stiff-arming running backs, goalposts, and footballs turning end over end. Marilyn touched a hand to Harris’s arm. “Did you know the coach stopped drinking?”