Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“When did he do that?”

“Almost a year ago,” she said. “Not quite.”

“That’s good news,” said Harris.

“He isn’t the same man, Harris,” she told him. “You’ll see that.”

“Okay,” said Harris doubtfully.

“Come say hi.”

She led him past the buffet, three card tables pushed together and spread with food enough for ten times as many guests as there were in attendance. Aside from one or two of Fetko’s employees and a dozen or so members of Marilyn’s family, among them an authentic-looking Jew, with the little hat and the abolitionist beard, whom Marilyn introduced as her brother, the room was empty. A few women were huddled at the back of the room around a cerulean football that Harris supposed must be the blanketed new Fetko.

In the old days, at a function like this, there would have been a great ring of standing stones around Fetko, dolmens and menhirs in pistachio pants, with nicknames like Big Mack and One-Eye. Some of the members of the ’55 national champions, Harris knew, had died or moved to faraway places; the rest had long since been burned, used up, worn out, or, in one case, sent to prison by one or another of Fetko’s schemes. Now there remained only Oly Olafsen, Red Johnnie Green, and Hugh Eggert with his big cigar. Red Johnnie had on a black suit with a funereal tie, Oly was wearing another of his sharkskin tarpaulins, and Hugh had solved the troublesome problem of dressing for the dark ritual of an alien people by coming in his very best golf clothes. When they saw Harris, they pounded him on the back and shook his hand. They squeezed his biceps, assessed his grip, massaged his shoulders, jammed their stubbly chins into the crook of his neck, and, in the case of Hugh Eggert, gave his left buttock a farmerly slap. Harris had been in awe of them most of his life. Now he regarded them with envy and dismay. They had grown old without ever maturing: quarrelsome, salacious boys zipped into enormous rubber man-suits. Harris, on the other hand, had bid farewell to his childhood aeons ago, without ever having managed to grow up.

“Harris,” said Fetko. “How about that.” The tip of his tongue poked out from the corner of his mouth, and he hitched up the waist of his pants, as if he were about to attempt something difficult. He was shorter than Harris remembered — fatter, grayer, older, sadder, more tired, more bald, with more broken blood vessels in his cheeks. He was, Harris quickly calculated, sixty-one, having already been most of the way through his thirties, a head coach in Denver with a master’s in sports physiology, before he selected Harris’s mother from a long list of available candidates and began his grand experiment in breeding. As usual he was dressed today in black high-tops, baggy black ripstop pants, and a black polo shirt. The muscles of his arms stretched the ribbed armbands of his shirtsleeves. With his black clothes, his close-cropped hair, and his eyes that were saved from utter coldness by a faint blue glint of lunacy, he looked like a man who had been trained in his youth to drop out of airplanes in the dead of night and strangle enemy dictators in their sleep.

“Son,” he said.

“Hey there, Coach,” said Harris.

The moment during which they might have shaken hands, or even — in an alternate-historical universe where the Chinese discovered America and a ten-year-old Adolf Hider was trampled to death by a passing milk wagon — embraced, passed, as it always did. Fetko nodded.

“I heard you played good today,” he said.

Harris lowered his head to hide the fact that he was blushing.

“I was all right,” he said. “Congratulations on the kid. What’s his name?”

“Sid Luckman,” said Fetko, and the men around him, except for Harris, laughed. Their laughter was nervous and insincere, as if Fetko had said something dirty. “Being as how he’s a Jewish boy.” Fetko nodded with tolerant, Einsteinian pity toward his old buddies. “These bastards here think it’s a joke.”

No, no, they reassured him. Sid Luckman was an excellent choice. Still, you had to admit—

“Luckman’s the middle name,” said Harris.

“That’s right.”

“I like it.”

Fetko nodded again. He didn’t care if Harris liked it or not. Harris was simply — had always been — there to know when Fetko wasn’t joking.

“He’s very glad to see you,” said Marilyn Levine, with a hard edge in her voice, prodding Fetko. “He’s been worrying about it all week.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Fetko.

Marilyn gave Harris a furtive nod to let him know that she had been telling the truth. She was standing with her arm still laced through Harris’s, smelling pleasantly of talcum. Harris gave her hand a squeeze. He had spent the better part of his childhood waiting for Fetko to bring someone like Marilyn Levine home to raise him. Now he had a brief fantasy of yanking her out of the room by this warm hand, of hustling her and young Sid Luckman into the aubergine Chevy Impala and driving them thousands of miles through the night to a safe location. His own mother had fled Fetko when Harris was six, promising to send for him as soon as she landed on her feet. The summons never came. She had married again, and then again after that, and had moved two dozen times over the last fifteen years. Harris let go of his stepmother’s hand. Probably there was no such safe place to hide her and the baby. Everywhere they went, she would find men like Fetko. For all Harris knew, he was a man like Fetko, too.

“Hello?”

Everyone turned. There was a wizened man standing behind Harris, three feet tall, a thousand years old, carrying a black leather pouch under his arm.

“I am Dr. Halbenzoller,” he said regretfully. He had a large welt on his forehead and wore a bewildered, fearful expression, as if he had misplaced his eyeglasses and were feeling his way through the world. “Where are the parents?”

“I’m the boy’s father,” said Fetko, taking the old man’s hand. “This is the mother — Marilyn. She’s the observant one, here.”

Dr. Halbenzoller turned his face toward Marilyn. He looked alarmed.

“The father is not Jewish?”

Marilyn shook her head. “No, but we spoke about it over the phone, Dr. Halbenzoller, don’t you remember?”

“I don’t remember anything,” said Dr. Halbenzoller. He looked around the room, as if trying to remember how he had got to the outlandish place in which he now found himself. His gaze lingered a moment on Harris, wonderingly and with evident disapproval, as if he were looking at a Great Dane someone had dressed up in a madras jacket and taught to smile.

“I’m an existential humanist,” Fetko told him. “That’s always been my great asset as a coach. Over the long series, an atheistic coach will always beat a coach who believes in God.” Fetko, whose own lifetime record was an existential 163–162, had been out of coaching for quite a while now, and Harris could see that he missed being interviewed. “Anyway, I don’t feel I could really give the Jewish faith a fair shake—”

Dr. Halbenzoller turned to Marilyn.

“Tell them I’d like to begin,” he said, as if she were his interpreter. He took the pouch from under his arm. “Where is the child?”

Marilyn led him over to the back of the room, where, beside the huddle of women, a card table had been set up and draped in a piece of purple velvet. Dr. Halbenzoller undid the buckles on his pouch and opened it, revealing a gleaming set of enigmatic tools.

“And the sandek, ” he said to Marilyn. “You have one?”

Marilyn looked at Fetko.

“Norm?”

Fetko looked down at his hands.

“Norm.”

Fetko shrugged and looked up. He studied Harris’s face and took a step toward him. Involuntarily, Harris took a step back. “It’s like a godfather,” Fetko said. “To the kid. Marilyn and I were wondering.”