Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

“Please,” he said, nodding to the fitful legs, and Harris understood that somebody was going to have to hold his brother down.

THE FOUR TAVERNS of Chubb Island, Washington, were haunted almost exclusively by local drunks. The summer people did their drinking on the porches and decks of their summer houses or, when that paled, under the paper umbrellas at the bar of the Yang Palace. At the V.F.W., and at the Chubb Island Bow & Rifle Club, out on Cemetery Road, they poured gin and vodka, but to the summer people these places were to be avoided, being just a hair too laughable to be legendary. From time to time, particularly toward the end of August, when tedium, hot weather, and the dwindling promise of another summer agitated ancient Viking fibers in their brains, a party of adventurers from the pink and yellow houses along Probity Beach might attempt a foray into the Chubb Island Tavern, the Blue Heron, Peavey’s, or the Patch. But they never stayed long. The local drunks — there must have been about sixty-five or seventy of them, many related by blood or sexual history — were a close-knit population, involved in an ongoing collective enterprise: the building, over several generations, of a basilica of failure, on whose crowded friezes they figured in vivid depictions of bankruptcy, drug rehabilitation, softball, and arrest. There was no role in this communal endeavor for the summer islander, on leave, as it were, from work on the cathedral of his or her own bad decisions.

It was unusual, therefore, to find not one but two attractive strangers at the bar of the Patch on a Friday night in early spring, studying the glints and gas bubbles in their beers: a man and a woman, with an empty barstool between them. It was not yet seven, and the Patch, a dank, ill-lit, cramped cement structure that had once served as the main building of a long-defunct strawberry-processing plant, was almost empty. In the corner across from the door, Lester Foley — elected by a plebiscite of local drunks to the mayoralty of Berthannette, a minute township made up of a general store and a post office, a failed Shell station, and the Patch — was sleeping, curled into a ball that did not seem large enough to be composed of an entire man.

The man at the bar spun away on his stool from the dispiriting sight of Lester, rolled up like a potato bug with his hair matted down and a mysterious rime of white feathers on his beard, and gave his attention to the Patch’s decor: promotional posters listing the locations and dates of all the games the Seahawks had lost that season; the threadbare baize of the pool table; a small black-and-white photograph of a freak three-pound strawberry that had turned up in the summer of 1948; and the blinking, pink or blue names of several beers. The stranger was a dark-eyed young man, thickset but small of stature, better dressed than the usual Patch customer, even for a Friday night, in a tweed blazer worn over a crew-neck sweater that looked like lamb’s wool but might even have been cashmere. Only the fresh wad of black tape that bound up his stylish bronze eyeglasses, and the day’s growth of stubble on his cheeks, argued at all in favor of his admission, on a pro-tem basis, into the Chubb Island losers’ guild. There was something in the way his handsome jacket strained at the shoulders, in the gray shadow on his jaw, that implied a deep reserve of resentment, a list of grievances carried around in the billfold, on a sheet of paper split and tattered with much refolding. He looked like the kind of customer who drinks wordlessly, and without apparent pleasure, all evening, like a patient given control of his own morphine drip. He looked like a man dangerously addicted to the correction of mistaken people.

“I thought this was a happening place,” he said now, to nobody in particular, still gazing out into the neon gloom of the barroom.

Mike Veal heard the remark but took advantage of a continuing pressure problem with the Rainier tap to let it pass. The customer was drinking a bottle of Pilsner Urquell, which Mike had found only after much digging around on his hands and knees, with his arm plunged far into the icy recesses of the No. 2 cooler, behind the box of microwavable Honey ’n’ Jalapeño Cheesy Pork Pockets. And of course Lester Foley had nothing to say on the subject of the happeningness of the Patch.

“Why don’t you put a buck in the jukebox?” said the woman from her stool. “I bet they even have your favorite song.”

She was a long, bony woman, with an intelligent face a little raw around the nostrils. In spite of her naturally blond hair and a backside that projected with a certain architectural audacity out over the rear edge of her stool, the predominant impression she seemed likely to leave in the mind of a man surveying a barroom on a Friday night was one of elbows and knees. Although she was dressed like a familiar type of weather-beaten, llama-raising, herbalistic island woman — denim overalls and duck boots, hair pulled back from her forehead by a plain blue elastic headband, face naked but for an uncertain streak of mauve on the lips — no one would ever have mistaken her for a native. She straddled her barstool with an equestrian aplomb that suggested both a genteel upbringing and an overeager attempt to look as though she belonged. A copy of Un Sexe Qui N’est Pas Une, in the original French, protruded from the right pocket of the big shearling coat she had draped over the seat of the stool between her and the man. Her fingers were devoid of rings.

“ ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World,’ ” she continued, with a vague wave toward the jukebox.

“Is that my favorite song?” said the man. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a fat wallet. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s on there,” said Mike Veal helpfully. “James Brown’s greatest hits, on CD.”

The woman nodded. She raised her bottle of light beer to the man. “ ‘This is a man’s world,’ ” she sang, in a cracked little high-pitched James Brown wail. Then she turned away from him, folding back up into herself, as if she didn’t want him to get the idea she was flirting. The man took a dollar from his wallet and walked over to the jukebox. He fed several more dollars into the slot. “Sex Machine” began to play, as irritating and irresistible as a ringing telephone. The woman took a swallow of her watery, pale beer, her eyes comically wide, as if amazed by her own thirst.

“This your first time in here?” Mike asked her.

She nodded. “It always looked so hopping. Cars in the parking lot.”

“It’s early yet,” said Mike, looking at his watch. “They’ll be showing up any time.”

The tides of carousal on a Friday night on Chubb Island could be unpredictable. In general, the flow from Heron to Patch, Tavern to Peavey’s, was even and steady through the evening, but sometimes a special event, a darts tournament or a personal milestone such as a divorce, a birthday, or an acquittal, could bottle things up for an hour or two. “Unless all of them died in, like, a car crash or whatever.” He smiled with unconscious pleasure at this thought.

She nodded again and took another swallow.

“From the island?” said Mike.

“No,” said the woman, “but I’ve been coming here my whole life.”

“Family has a house?”

“On Probity Beach.”

“Nice.”

“I have a house of my own now. On Rhododendron Beach. I’ve been living here almost six years.”

“You’re a year-rounder, and you never been in here before?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I guess I never had a reason before.”

Leaving the question begged by this statement unasked, Mike went on tinkering with the Rainier tap. The woman lowered her eyes to the scuffed veneer of the bar, which was giving off its faint early-evening sting of ammonia. Originally, it had been the bar of Rudolph’s, a dive in a Quonset hut out at the old Navy airfield, which burned down back in 1956. There were some senior members of the losers’ guild who claimed they could still smell the fire on it.