Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

Harris was honored, and wildly touched, but he didn’t want to let on. “If you want,” he said. “What do I have to do?”

“Come stand next to me,” said Dr. Halbenzoller slowly, as you would speak to a well-dressed and intelligent dog.

Harris went over to the velvet-covered table and stood beside it, close enough to Dr. Halbenzoller to smell the steam in his ironed suit.

“Do you have to be a doctor to do this?” he asked.

“I’m a dentist,” said Dr. Halbenzoller. “Fifty years. This is just a hobby of mine.” He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and took out a slim volume of cracked black leather. “Bring the child.”

Sidney Luckman Fetko was brought forward and placed into Harris’s arms. He was wide awake, motionless, his lumpy little pinch-pot face peering out from the blue swaddling cloth. He weighed nothing at all. Fetko’s wife left the room. Dr. Halbenzoller opened the little book and began to chant. The language — Hebrew, Harris supposed — sounded harsh and angular and complaining. Sid Luckman’s eyes widened, as if he were listening. His head hadn’t popped entirely back into place yet after his passage through Marilyn Levine, and his features were twisted up a little on one side, giving him a sardonic expression. This is my brother, thought Harris. This is Fetko’s other son.

He was so lost in the meaning of this that he didn’t notice when several seconds had gone by in silence. Harris looked up. Dr. Halbenzoller was reaching out to Harris. Harris just looked at his hands, callused and yellow but unwrinkled, like a pair of old feet.

“It’s all right, Harris,” said Fetko. “Give him the baby.”

“Excuse me,” Harris said. He tucked Sid Luckman under his arm and headed for the fire door.

He sprinted across the back lot, past a long, rusting, red-and-white trailer home with striped aluminum awnings in which Harris’s mother had once direly predicted that Fetko would end his days, toward a swath of open land that stretched away behind the dealership, a vast tangle of blackberry brambles, dispirited fir trees, and renegade pachysandra escaped from some distant garden. In his late adolescence, Harris had often picked his way to a large clearing at the center of the tangle, a circular sea of dead grass where for decades the mechanics who worked in the service bays had tossed their extinguished car batteries and pans of broken-down motor oil. At the center of this cursed spot, Harris would he on his back, looking at the pigeon-colored Seattle sky, and expend his brain’s marvelous capacity for speculation on topics such as women's breasts, the big money, and Italian two-seaters.

These days there was no need to pick one’s way — a regular path had been cleared through the brush — and as they approached the clearing, Harris slowed. The woods were birdless, and the only sounds were the hum of traffic from Aurora Avenue, the snapping of twigs under his feet, and a low, hostile grunting from the baby. It had turned into a cold summer afternoon. The wind blew in from the north, smelling of brine and rust. As Harris approached the clearing, he found himself awash in regret, not for the thing he had just done or for shanked kicks or lost yardage or for the trust he had placed, so mistakenly, in others during his short, trusting, mistaken life, but for something more tenuous and faint, tied up in the memory of those endless afternoons spent lying on his back in that magical circle of poison, wasting his thoughts on things that now meant so little to him. Then he and Sid fell into the clearing.

Most of the trees around it, he saw, had been brought down, while those that remained had been stripped of their lower branches and painted, red or blue, with a white letter, wobbly and thin, running ten feet up the trunk. Exactly enough trees had been left, going around, to spell out the word POWERBALL. Harris had never seen a painted tree before, and the effect was startling. From a very tall pole at the center of the circle, each of nine striped rappelling cables extended, like the ribs of an umbrella, toward a wooden platform at the top of each of the painted trees. The ground had been patiently tilled and turned over, cleared of grass and rubbish, then patted down again, swept smooth and speckless as an infield. At the northern and southern poles of the arena stood a soccer-goal net, spray-painted gold. Someone had also painted a number of imitation billboards advertising Power Rub and the cigarettes, soft drinks, spark plugs, and malt liquors of fantasy sponsors, and nailed them up at key locations around the perimeter. The lettering was crude but the colors were right and if you squinted a little you might almost be persuaded. The care, the hard work, the childish attention to detail, and, above all, the years of misapplied love and erroneous hopefulness that had gone into its planning and construction seemed to Harris to guarantee the arena’s inevitable destruction by wind, weather, and the creeping pachysandra of failure that ultimately entangled all his father’s endeavors and overwhelmed the very people they were most intended to avail. Fetko was asking for it.

“Look what Coach did,” Harris said to Sid, tilting the baby a little so that he might see. “Isn’t that neat?”

Sid Luckman’s face never lost its dour, sardonic air, but Harris found himself troubled by an unexpected spasm of forgiveness. The disaster of Powerball, when finally it unfolded, as small-scale disappointment or as massive financial collapse, would not really be Fetko’s fault. Harris’s entire life had been spent, for better or worse, in the struggling company of men, and he had seen enough by now to know that evergreen ruin wound its leaves and long tendrils around the habitations and plans of all fathers, everywhere, binding them by the ankles and wrists to their sons, whether the fathers asked for it or not.

“Get your ass back in there,” said Fetko, coming up behind them, out of breath. “Asses.”

Harris didn’t say anything. He could feel his father’s eyes on him, but he didn’t turn to look. The baby snuffled and grunted in Harris’s arms.

“I, uh, I did all this myself,” Fetko said after a moment.

“I figured.”

“Maybe later, if you wanted to, we could go over some of the fine points of the game.”

“Maybe we could.”

Fetko shook himself and slapped his palms together. “Fine, but now come on, goddammit. Before the little Jewish gentleman in there seizes up on us.”

Harris nodded. “Okay,” he said.

As he carried Sid past their father, Harris felt his guts contract in an ancient reflex, and he awaited the cuff, jab, karate chop, rabbit punch, head slap, or boot to the seat of his pants that in his youth he had interpreted as a strengthening exercise designed to prepare him for his career as an absorber of terrible impacts but that now, as Fetko popped him on the upper arm hard enough to make him wince, touching him for the first time in five years, he saw as the expression of a sentiment at once so complicated and inarticulate, neither love nor hatred but as elemental as either, that it could only be expressed by contusing the skin. Harris shifted Sid Luckman to his left arm and, for the first time ever, raised a fist to pop Fetko a good one in return. Then he changed his mind and lowered his hand and carried the baby through the woods to the dealership with Fetko following behind them, whistling a tuneless and impatient song through his teeth.

When they got back, Harris handed over Sid Luckman. Dr. Halbenzoller set the baby down on the velvet cloth. He reached into his pouch and took out a rectangular stainless-steel device that looked a little like a cigar trimmer. The baby shook his tiny fists. His legs, unswaddled, beat the air like butterfly wings. Dr. Halbenzoller brought the cigar trimmer closer to his tiny panatela. Then he glanced up at Harris.