Michael Chabon - Werewolves in Their Youth

The woman dabbed an indecipherable sketch with her fingertip in the mist on her glass. “Do you know a guy called Olivier?” she said, not looking up.

“Sure.”

“He comes in here?”

“Does he?”

“I thought he did. I thought …”

“Are you looking for him?”

“No.”

“Here,” said the man, returning from the jukebox with his wallet clutched in one hand and a twenty-dollar bill in the other. He handed the bill to the woman. “From yesterday.”

“Oh, yes,” said the woman. “But it was only seventeen.”

The man nodded. “I’ll take the difference in beer.” He held up his empty bottle to Mike Veal and gave it a shake. “Olivier?” he said.

“Olivier Berquet,” said Mike, studying the two with fresh interest. “I guess he’s, what, a Frenchman?”

“And I’ve heard an awful lot about that little Frenchman, let me tell you,” the man said. “The Phantom Frog of Chubb Island.” He turned to the woman. “How’s that for a title? Can you get a poem out of that?”

“What’s your name?” the woman said to Mike Veal.

“Mike.”

“Mike, am I allowed to say ‘fuck’ in this bar?”

“I wouldn’t try to stop you.”

The woman turned to the man. “Fuck you, Jake,” she said.

The door opened and, as always happened on a cold night when someone came in from outside, a low, mournful moaning filled the bottommost levels of sound in the barroom, humming around the ankles of the customers like a roiling cloud. The Korg sisters, Ellen and Lisabeth, walked in, followed in short order by New Wave Dave Willard, Harley Dave Sackler, Debbie Browne, Ray Lindquist, Nice Dave Madsen, and a number of other employees of the Gearhead plant, just down the road from Berthannette. Gearhead made accessories and specialty parts for sport-utility vehicles. It was the island’s largest employer and the source of a small but steady current of the Patch’s income. There had been an employees’ meeting tonight, after work, which was why the bar had remained empty for so long. Now, with a great deal of sorrowful moaning and gusts of cold wind, it filled up quickly.

Lester Foley was awakened. This was done by Harley Dave’s cracking open a can of beer next to his ear, which was followed by uproarious general laughter when he scrabbled awake like a dog at the sound of a can opener grinding away on its evening Alpo. Lester grinned his foolish feathered grin, took the beer that was his reward for making everyone laugh, and started in on one of his trademark mayoral disquisitions whose interminability was relieved only by their total lack of sense. The former handyman had been drinking steadily since 1975. In June of that year, Lester had got a job putting up a boathouse and dock for a summer family named Lichty, whose handsome young son, a boy of fifteen, took to tagging along with Lester and helping him with his work. In the evenings they hid in the driftwood piles down at the dark end of Probity Beach, smoking marijuana and drinking beer. On the first of July, they drove out to the Nisqually reservation and for twenty dollars filled the hatch of Lester’s VW squareback with illegal fireworks. On the fifth of July, at two o’clock in the morning, at the end of the sturdy fir dock Lester had built, a Silver Salute with a defective fuse burst prematurely, before Lester and the boy could get clear of it. The explosion, which the investigator from the Chubb Island Fire Department had estimated as equal to the force of half a stick of industrial-grade dynamite, killed the Lichty boy and blew off Lester’s right thumb and forefinger. Since then he had not worked much. It was rare that anything he said managed to be succinct or intelligible.

“You can’t trust a woodpecker,” he was insisting now to the Korg sisters, with that special undissuadableness of his. “They’re just too goddam unreliable. I could have told you that from the get-go.”

“Who said anything about a woodpecker?” said Lisabeth Korg.

By eight o’clock, there was not an empty stool at the bar, quarters were lined up seven deep on the lip of the pool table, and so many people were dancing around the jukebox that Mrs. Magarac, the owner, who had come straight from her twelve-step meeting, could barely navigate from the bar to the farthest booths with a sweating tray full of beer.

“Well?” said the woman at the bar to the man she had cursed. The crowding of the Patch had forced them onto adjoining stools. She drew her bottle of beer across the air before her, taking in the noise and laughter and smoke. “Any likely prospects?”

“Oh, my God,” said Jake. He closed his eyes. There was a migraine translucence in the skin around his eyes. He rolled his bottle of Pilsner Urquell, his fourth, across his brow.

“What about her?” the woman said.

“Which one?”

“With the red hair. I know her. I think she works at the Thriftway.”

“Oh, yeah.” He still had not opened his eyes. “I’ve seen her. Curly.”

“Cute, I think.”

“I dislike this,” said the man. “Can I just tell you that? I never came to a bar like this before. Why should I start now, just because—”

“You never came to this type of bar before, or you never came to a bar in this manner?”

“Grace, I think I’d better — I think I’m going to split.”

“Don’t be a wiener, Jake.”

“No, I’m just—”

“Come on, weasel,” she said, aiming at him with an index finger. Looking at it, he went cross-eyed for a moment. “We made a deal. About tonight.”

“Yeah, I know I made a deal,” he said. “And I know what’s going to happen. I’m going to go home alone, with a big goose egg in the romance department, while you zip off with Monsieur Olivier, on his little scooter, with his scarf tucked into his lapels—”

“He’s here. That’s him.”

Jake’s eyes snapped open and he checked out Olivier Berquet, just walking into the Patch. If he had really been expecting a natty little loafer-wearer, crest embroidered on the pocket of his blazer, sweater knotted cavalierly around his neck, he must have been disappointed. Olivier Berquet was not French at all, as it happened, but Québécois — a big-handed carpenter with a tall man’s stoop, long blond hair, and a massively handsome face, craggy and pitted, a face that looked as if it had been carved with a pneumatic drill by a tiny workman dangling from the sheer granite cliff of Olivier’s forehead. He wore a black motorcycle jacket, ripped blue jeans, and Roper’s boots. He was well known on the island both for the quality of his work, which was high, and for the terrible treatment his wife received at his hands, which — though never definitively established in a court of law or through some famous public incident of the sort popular among the Patch’s patrons — ranged, by local rumor, from the merely callous to the outright mean. At one time or another, he had troubled the evenings of all the island’s bartenders. Now he had begun dancing, working his hips and bobbing his big Gutzon Borglum head. He was a good dancer, consciously so, leggy and languid, his movements not so much in time to the music as in illustration of it.

“He has a big butt,” said Jake. “I’ve noticed that’s something you like.”

“Jake,” said Grace, not responding. She pointed to Jake’s other side. He turned. The woman with the curly red hair, who was in fact a checker at the Thriftway in Probity Harbor, was standing beside him. He knew her after all: Brenda Petersen. She and some of her friends had washed Jake’s car for him one Saturday morning almost six years earlier — his first summer on the island — to raise money for their senior-class trip. Since then their paths had crossed without issue or remark at least a couple of dozen times. Her bright red fusillade of skyrocket curls was her most striking feature, but her youth, her plumpness, and a startling lack of shyness all worked in her favor.