Werewolves in Their Youth (17 page)

The boys stood in a broken line along the base path between third and home, in bits and pieces of outgrown and hand-me-down uniforms, ripped jeans, dusty caps bearing the insignia of a dozen different major league teams, but all of them wearing complicated polychrome athletic shoes tricked out with lights, air pumps, windows, fins, ailerons, spoilers. They were skinny, mean-looking boys, scratch hitters and spikers of second basemen, dirt players, brushback artists. One of them was almost as tall as a man, with a faint pencil sketch of a mustache on his upper lip. They all stared at Bengt as he sidled up to the line. He was shorter than any of them, ten pounds heavier, and as he looked up at the coach he blushed, and gave an apologetic little laugh, which, amid that gang of tiny hard cases, came off inevitably as shrill and unbecoming. Standing with the other boys Bengt reminded Kohn of the leather button used in his family for many years to replace the shoe in Monopoly, ranged at Go alongside the race car, the top hat, and the scrappy little dog, plump and homely and still trailing a snippet of brown thread. When he saw Kohn he colored again, and looked down at his feet. This time his glasses fell off. They landed in the mud. A few of the boys laughed. Bengt picked them up and wiped the lenses on his sweatshirt.

“I guess now we know what happened to Joe Jackson’s shoes,” said a father, and all the men and boys laughed.

“Hello,” said the coach, walking over to Kohn, looking a little suspicious. “Glad you could make it. You must be …”

He held out his hand, waiting for Kohn to supply the explanation, the narrative that would plausibly connect him to Bengt Thorkelson.

“I’m just a neighbor,” Kohn said.

“Hey, that’s okay,” the coach said. He was a large man, rubicund in the face, hard and fat in the Boog Powell style. A pure pull hitter. He forced his genial features onto a grid of seriousness, and looked at Bengt, who was looking down at his uncle’s shoes. “We understand.”

Kohn was handed third base, a heavy mysterious parcel, and stepped out onto a ball field for the first time in ten years. It was not much of a field; mangy, pebbly, two-thirds-sized, with the hulk of a commercial henhouse collapsing in the field on the other side of the fence in deep right. But the dirt was a rich brown, the color of fir-tree bark, and where there was grass it was thick and spongy and freshly cut. Bengt led him to the square pipe buried in the dirt at the hot corner, and they tamped the pegged base down into it. The boy kicked at the base, circled it, then climbed up onto it and kicked at it again, affecting the taut air of a base runner stranded at third, waiting for somebody to hit one, anything, a blooper, a cheap little broken-bat single.

“I’ve never been on third before,” he said presently.

“It’s nice,” Kohn said.

“It’s not bad,” said Bengt. He looked at his watch, black plastic with a liquid-crystal face. “Don’t you have to go?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“But you can’t stay, can you?”

“I’d better not.”

“They don’t really do anything,” Bengt said. “Mostly they just stand around talking.”

“That doesn’t sound too tough,” Kohn said. “I could probably manage that.”

For the first ten minutes the coach had the boys stretch, alternate crunches with push-ups, and focus their mental energies, since the key to good baseball, in spite of what they might have seen or observed, was mental effort. All of the fathers appeared relieved to be exempted from this portion of the proceedings. They stood around behind home plate, smoking, leaning against the backstop. Then when practice began—ball tossing, bunting and base-running exercises, followed by an intrasquad game—the men, as Bengt had suggested, mostly stayed put. From time to time they exhorted their sons, or teased them, not always kindly. The boys made a study of ignoring the men and the things they said. And yet Kohn felt that the presence of their fathers on the other side of the chain-link backstop was as indispensable to them as bats, dirt, spikes, grass, the reliable pain of a baseball smacking against the heels of their mitts. If a boy’s father somehow missed a play, a nice catch, a bunt laid down stiff and inflexible as rebar, the boy acted quite put out.

Kohn found himself standing with the fathers, neither included in their conversation nor made to feel particularly unwelcome. Some of the men seemed to recognize him; they exchanged pleasantries and agreed that it had, finally, stopped raining. At one point there was a low chuckle at the far end of the group of fathers, some of the men looked at him, and Kohn heard the name of Bengt’s mother mentioned. He wondered if he should say something to explain, to correct their misapprehension. The coach hit a soft line drive toward Bengt, who stumbled, knocked the ball to the ground, and chanced to fall on top of it. He stood up, looking stunned, then remembered to pick up the ball and shag it back in to the coach. His throwing style managed nonchalance without troubling much about accuracy.

“Nice stop!” Kohn called.

Half an hour into the practice, a station wagon pulled up. The door sprang open, and a boy ran onto the field. Kohn gathered that this was Tommy Latrobe, who had been taken ill during school hours with an illness now unaccountably cured. The other boys hectored him like crows until he told them to shut up.

Tommy Latrobe’s father walked up and stood beside Kohn. He was fair, freckled, dressed in the full, pinstriped regalia of the Chubb Tavern Mudcats, carrying a glove and a pair of bats. He looked Kohn up and down. “Cold?” he said.

Kohn unzipped his parka as far as he could; the zipper always jammed at the last two inches.

“Uh-oh,” Latrobe said, pointing. “That one’s through.”

Kohn looked out at the field, where Bengt Thorkelson, at short, down on one knee, with boys running wild on the base paths, waited for the slowest ground ball in the history of baseball to roll into his mitt, his small face bright with wonder and dread.

“So which one is yours?” said Latrobe.

After practice was over, Kohn drove them both back to Valhalla Beach. The boy was silent. He seemed to be reviewing all of the errors he had made, the rallies he had scotched. Kohn searched for the appropriate platitudes and encomiums. Before he knew it they were home. He steered the van back into the swamped half-acre of mud and gravel.

“Well,” he began.

“That’s my gran’s car,” Bengt said, pointing to a sober gray Dart parked beside the Civic. He jumped out of the van and ran down the rickety wooden steps that led to his house, without remembering to say good-bye. Kohn walked down the hill to his own house, and called his lawyer to apologize. The secretary said she wasn’t in, and would not be able to take his calls anymore.

A few days later when Kohn went into Seattle to buy lumber and saw blades and screens for his bong, he spotted a pair of flashy baseball shoes in the window of an athletic shoe store on Forty-fifth. They were absurdly beautiful things, a cross between architecture and graffiti, wrapped in blue tissue. They cost a hundred and fifty-two dollars and forty-two cents. Kohn laid down two fifties, two twenties, a ten and three ones, then reached into the pocket of his coat.

“I believe I have the two cents,” he said.

T
HE HOTEL IN
T
ACOMA
was a Luxington Parc. There was one in Spokane, one in Great Falls, and another in downtown Saskatoon. It was half motor lodge, half state-of-the-art correctional institution, antacid pink with gun-slit windows. There was a stink of chlorine from the waterfall in the atrium where the chimes of the elevators echoed all night with a sound like a dental instrument hitting a cold tile floor. A message from Norm Fetko, Harris’s father, was waiting at the desk on Friday night when the team got in. It said that on the previous Friday Fetko’s wife had given birth to a son and that the next afternoon, at three o’clock, they were going to remove his little foreskin, of all things, in a Jewish religious ceremony to be held, of all places, at Fetko’s car dealership up in Northgate. Whether by design or hotel policy, the message was terse, and Harris’s invitation to his half brother’s bris was only implied.

When Harris got upstairs to his room, he sat with his hand on the telephone. The passage of four years since his last contact with Fetko had done little to incline him to forgiveness. He tended, as did most commentators on the Harris Fetko story, to blame his father for his own poor character and the bad things that had happened to him. He decided it would be not only best for everyone but also highly satisfying not to acknowledge in any way his father’s attempt at renewing contact, an attempt whose motives, with an uncharitableness born of long experience, Harris suspected at once.

He picked up the receiver and dialed Bob Badham. There was no answer. Harris set the receiver down on the floor of his room—it was in his contract that he got a room to himself—lay down alongside it, and squeezed out the one thousand abdominal crunches he had been squeezing out every night since he was eleven years old. When he had finished, he got up, went into the bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror with approval and dispassion. He was used from long habit to thinking of his body as having a certain monetary value or as capable of being translated, mysteriously, into money, and if it were somehow possible, he would have paid a handsome sum to purchase himself. He turned away from the mirror and sat down on the lid of the toilet to trim the nails of his right hand. When his nails were clipped and filed square, he went back out to pick up the telephone. It was still ringing. He hung up and dialed Bob’s work number.

“Screw you, Bob,” Harris said cheerfully to Bob Badham’s voice-mail box. “I mean, hello.” He then left a detailed account of his current whereabouts and telephone number, the clean result of his most recent urine test, and the next destination on the team’s schedule, which was Boise, a Holiday Inn, on July 5. Harris possessed the sort of wild, formless gift that attracted the gaze of harsh men and disciplinarians, and the whole of his twenty-six years had been lived under the regimens of hard-asses. Bob Badham was merely the latest of these.

There was a knock at the door. Harris went to answer it in his pin-stripe bikini briefs, hoping, not quite unconsciously, that he would find an attractive female member of the Western Washington Association of Mortgage Brokers (here for their annual convention) come to see if it was really true that the briefly semi-notorious Harris Fetko was in the hotel.

“Why aren’t you in bed?” said Lou Sammartino.

The coach of the Regina Kings club of the North American Professional Indoor Football League was not, as it happened, a hard-ass. He indulged his players far more than most of them deserved—housing them with his family when things went badly for them; remembering their birthdays; nudging them to save receipts, phone their wives, pay their child support. He was an intelligent man of long experience who, like many coaches Harris had played for, believed, at this point in his career rather desperately, in the myth of the football genius, a myth in which Harris himself, having been raised by a football genius, had learned by the age of seventeen to put no stock whatever. Lou Sammartino believed that the problem of winning at football was surely one susceptible to the systematic application of an inspired and unbiased mind. His lifetime record as a coach, including a stint in the short-lived Mexican Football League of 1982, was 102—563. He pushed past Harris and barked at his quarterback to close the door. He was hunched and rotund, with a jowly, pocked face and immense black-rimmed spectacles. The smell of his cologne was exactly like that of the tiny red cardboard pine trees that dangle from the rearview mirrors of taxicabs.

“What’s the matter?” said Harris. He looked out into the hallway, in both directions, then closed the door against the stiff artificial breeze that came howling down the deserted corridor.

“We need to talk.” Lou sat down on the bed and studied Harris. His watery brown eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were beautiful in a way that suited his losing record. “You called your PO?”

“I left a message.”

“Aren’t you supposed to see him in person when you’re home?”

“I’m
not
home,” said Harris. “Technically. My
home
is Seattle. We’re in
Tacoma.
”

“Technically,” said Lou. “A word much beloved of fuckups.”

“Something to drink?” Harris went to the minibar. There was nothing in it except for a rattling ice tray and a ghostly smell of caulk. The minibars were always empty in Luxington Parcs and in most of the other hotels the Regina Kings patronized. Often they were not even plugged in. “I’m supposed to have six bottles of mineral water,” Harris said. He tried not to sound petulant, but it was difficult, because he was feeling petulant.

“Aw,” said Lou.

“I’m sick of this!” Harris slammed the refrigerator door shut. “Every fucking time I walk into my room and open the minibar door, there’s supposed to be six fucking bottles of mineral water in there.” The slammed door rebounded and bashed into the wall beside the minibar. Its handle gouged a deep hole in the wallboard. Crumbs of plaster spattered the floor. Harris ran his fingers along the edges of the hole he had made in the wall. A feeling of remorse took wing in his chest, but with an old, sure instinct, he caught it and neatly twisted its neck. He turned to Lou, trying to look certain of himself and his position. The truth was that Harris didn’t even like mineral water; he thought it tasted like saliva. But it was in his contract. “So, okay, talk. It’s past my bedtime.”

“Harris, in a minute or two there’s someone coming up here with a proposition for you.” Just as he said this, there was another knock at the door. Harris jumped. “He wants to offer you a job.”

“I already have a job.”

Lou turned up the corners of his mouth but somehow failed to produce a viable smile.

“Lou,” said Harris, and his heart started to pound. “Please tell me the league isn’t folding.”

There had been rumors to this effect since before the season even began; attendance at games in all but a few sports-starved cities was declining by a thousand or more every weekend, the owner of the Portland team had been murdered by Las Vegas wiseguys, and the Vancouver bank on whose line of credit the NAPIFL depended for its operating costs was under investigation by the government of Canada.