Werewolves in Their Youth (18 page)

Lou stroked the bedspread, smoothing it, watching the back of his hand.

“I just want to play out the schedule,” he said sadly. “I could be happy with that.”

“Harris?” said a man on the other side of the door. “You there?”

Harris put on his jeans and went to the door.

“Oly,” he said. He took a step back into the room. The man at the door was enormous, six feet eight inches tall, just shy of three hundred pounds. Like Norm Fetko a member of the 1955 national champions and—unlike Fetko—a successful businessman, purveyor of a popular topical analgesic, Oly Olafsen had always been the biggest man Harris knew, a chunk of the northern ice cap, a piece of masonry, fifteen tons of stone, oak, and gristle supporting eight cubic inches of grinning blond head. He wore silver aviator eyeglasses and a custom-tailored suit, metallic gray, so large and oddly proportioned that it was nearly unrecognizable as an article of human clothing and appeared rather to have been designed to straiten an obstreperous circus elephant or to keep the dust off some big, delicate piece of medical imaging technology.

“How’s my boy?” said Oly.

It had been Oly Olafsen’s money, more or less, that Harris had used, more or less without Oly’s knowing about it, to purchase the pound of cocaine the police had found under the rear bench of Harris’s 300ZX when they pulled him over that night on Ravenna Avenue. He gave Harris’s hand a squeeze that compressed the very bones.

“So,” he went on, “the coach has got himself another son after all these years. That’s a thought, isn’t it? Wonder what he’s got cooked up for this one.”

This remark angered Harris, whom the sporting world for two hectic and disappointing collegiate seasons had known as Frankenback. Among the failings of his character exposed during that time was a total inability to stand up to teasing about any aspect of his life, his father’s experimentation least of all. With a great effort and out of an old habit of deference to his father’s cronies, he got himself to smile, then realized that Oly wasn’t teasing him at all. On the contrary, there had been in Oly’s soft voice a disloyal wrinkle of concern for the fate, at his great idol’s hands, of the latest little Fetko to enter the world.

“Yeah, he asked me out to the showroom tomorrow,” Harris said. “To the thing where they, what’s that, circumcise the kid.”

“Are you people Jewish?” said Lou, surprised. “I didn’t know.”

“We’re not. Fetko isn’t. I guess his new wife must be.”

“I’ll be there. Ah!” Gingerly—his knees were an ancient ruin of cartilage and wire—Oly lowered himself into the desk chair, which creaked in apparent horror at the slow approach of his massive behind. “As a matter of fact, I’m paying for the darn thing.” Oly smiled, then took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. When he put the glasses back on, he wasn’t smiling anymore. “The coach has got himself into a little bit of a tight spot out there in Northgate,” he said, pressing his palms together as if they represented the terrific forces that were putting the squeeze on Fetko. “I know things haven’t been, well, the greatest between you two since … everything that happened, but the coach—Harris, he’s really putting his life back together. He’s not—”

“Get to the point,” said Harris.

An odd expression came over Oly’s generally peaceful and immobile face. His eyebrows reached out to each other over the bridge of his nose, and his tiny, pale lips compressed into a pout. He was unhappy, possibly even actively sad. Harris had never imagined that Oly might ever be feeling anything but hunger and gravitation.

“Harris, I’m not going to lie to you, the old man could really use a little help,” said Oly. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. I don’t know if Lou has mentioned it, but the coach and I—”

“I told him,” said Lou. “Harris isn’t interested.”

“Isn’t he?” Oly looked at Lou, his face once again a region of blankness, his eyes polite and twinkling. He had pleasant, vacant little eyes that, along with his bulk and a recipe purchased in 1963 from a long-dead Chinese herbalist in the International District for $250, had enabled him to do what was necessary to make Power Rub the number-three topical analgesic in the western United States. “Somebody might think he would be very interested in finding another job, seeing as how this outfit of yours is about to go belly-up.” He turned his flashbulb eyes toward Harris now. “Seeing as how what they call gainful employment is a condition of his parole.”

“If that happens, and I don’t personally feel that it will, Harris can find another job. He doesn’t need any help from you.”

“What is he going to do? He doesn’t know how to do anything but be a quarterback! It’s in his genes, it’s in his blood particles. It’s wired into his darn brain. No, I figure he has to be very interested in hearing about an opportunity like this. A chance to actually
redefine the position,
at twice his present salary, in front of a guaranteed national cable audience of
forty-four million homes.
”

Harris was accustomed to having his disposition discussed and his fate decided, in his presence, by other people; it was part of that same mysterious alchemy that could transmute his body into cash and of the somewhat less obscure process that had sent him to Ellensburg for nineteen months. But at the mention of cable television, he could not restrain himself.

“What is it?” he said. “What opportunity?” Oly reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a manila envelope, folded in half. He took a color brochure from the envelope and handed it to Harris. Harris sat down on the bed to read. It was a prospectus designed to attract investors to a league that would feature a sport that the brochure called Powerball, “the first new major American sport in a hundred years,” to be played in every major city in the United States, apparently by men in garish uniforms that were part samurai armor and part
costume de ballet,
one of whom was depicted, on the airbrushed cover of the brochure, swinging across the playing arena from a striped rappelling cable. The description was vague, but, as far as Harris could tell, Powerball appeared to be an amalgam of rugby, professional wrestling, and old pirate movies. It was not football or anything close to football. Once Harris realized this, he skimmed through such phrases as “speed, drama, and intense physical action … the best elements of today’s most popular sports … our proposed partnership with the Wrestling Channel … all the elements are in place … revolutionary, popular, and, above all, profitable …” until he turned to the last page and found a photograph of his father beside a caption that identified him as “coaching great Norm Fetko, inventor of Powerball, part owner and coach of the Seattle franchise.”

“Fetko invented this crap?” said Harris, tossing the brochure onto the floor.

“It came to him in a dream,” said Oly, looking solemn. He raised his hands to his eyes and spread his thick fingers, watching the air between them as it shimmered with another one of Norm Fetko’s lunatic visions. “A guy … with a football under his arm … swinging from a rope.” Oly shook his head as if awestruck by the glimpse Harris’s father had vouchsafed him into the mystic origins of the future of American sport. “This will be big, Harris. We already have a line on investors in nine cities. Our lawyers are working out the last few kinks in the TV contract. This could be a very, very big thing.”

“Big,” said Harris. “Yeah, I get it now.” For he saw, with admiration and to his horror, that at this late stage of his career Fetko had managed to come up with yet another way to ruin the lives and fortunes of hapless elevens of men. None of Fetko’s other failures—his golf resort out in the Banana Belt of Washington, his “revolutionary” orange football, his brief (pioneering, in retrospect) foray into politics as a candidate with no political convictions, his attempt to breed and raise the greatest quarterback the world would ever see—had operated in isolation. They had all roped in, ridden on the backs of, and ultimately broken a large number of other people. And around all of Fetko’s dealings and misdealings, Oly Olafsen had hovered, loving sidekick, pouring his money down Fetko’s throat like liquor. “That’s why he called. He wants me to play for him again.”

“Imagine the media, Harris, my gosh,” said Oly. “Norm and Harris Fetko reunited, that would sell a few tickets.”

Lou winced and sat down on the bed next to Harris. He put his hand on Harris’s shoulder. “Harris, you don’t want to do this.”

“No kidding,” said Harris. “Oly,” he said to Oly. “I hate my father. I don’t want to have anything to do with him. Or you. You guys all fucked me over once.”

“Hey, now, kid.” Another crack of grief opened in the glacial expanse of his face. “Look, you hate me, that’s one thing, but I know you don’t—”

“I hate him!”

Inside Harris Fetko the frontier between petulance and rage was generally left unguarded, and he crossed it now without slowing down. He stood up and went for Oly, wondering if somewhere in the tiny interval between the big man’s jaw and shoulders he might find a larynx to get his thumbs around. Oly started to rise, but his shattered knees slowed him, and before he could regain his feet, Harris had kicked the tiny chair out from under him. A sharp pain went whistling up Harris’s shin, and then his foot began to throb like a trumpet. The right foreleg of the wooden chair splintered from the frame, the chair tipped, and Oly Olafsen hit the flecked aquamarine carpet. His impact was at once loud and muffled, like the collision of a baseball bat and a suitcase filled with water.

“I’m sorry,” Harris said.

Oly looked up at him. His meaty fingers wrapped around the broken chair leg and clenched it. His breath blew through his nostrils as loud as a horse’s. Then he let go of the chair leg and shrugged. When Harris offered a hand, Oly took it.

“I just want to tell you something, Harris,” he said, smoothing down his sleeves. He winched up his trousers by the belt, then attended to the tectonic slippage of the shoulder pads in his jacket. “Everything the coach has, okay, is tied up in this thing. Not money. The coach doesn’t have any money. So far the money is mostly coming from me.” With a groan he stooped to retrieve the fallen brochure, then slipped it back into its envelope. “What the coach has tied up in this thing, it can’t be paid back or defaulted on or covered by a bridge loan.” He tapped the rolled manila envelope against the center of his chest. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“No, you will not,” said Harris as Oly went out. He tried to sound as though he were not in terrible pain. “I’m not going.”

Lou lifted Harris’s foot and bent the big toe experimentally. Harris groaned. A tear rolled down his cheek.

“You broke it,” said Lou. “Aw, Harris.”

“I’m sorry, Coach,” said Harris, falling backward on the bed. “Fucking Fetko, man. It’s all his fault.”

“Everything else, maybe it was Fetko’s fault,” said Lou, though he sounded doubtful. He picked up the telephone and asked room service to bring up a bucket of ice. “This was your fault.”

When the ice came, he filled a towel with it and held it against Harris’s toe for an hour until the swelling had gone down. Then he taped the big toe to its neighbor, patted Harris on the head, and went back to his room to revise the playbook for tomorrow. Before he went out, he turned.

“Harris,” he said, “you’ve never confided in me. And you’ve never particularly followed any of the copious advice I’ve been so generous as to offer you over the last few months.”

“Coach—”

“But regardless of that, I’m foolishly going to make one last little try.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on a rumpled shirttail. “I think you ought to go to that thing tomorrow.” He put his glasses back on again and blinked his eyes. “It’s your brother that’ll be lying there with his little legs spread.”

“Fuck the little bastard,” said Harris, with the easy and good-natured callousness that, like so much about the game of football, had always come so naturally to him. “I hope they slice the fucking thing clean off.”

Lou went out, shaking his big, sorrowful head. Ten minutes later there was another knock at the door. This time it was not a lady mortgage broker but a reporter for the
Morning News Tribune
come to poke around in the embers of the Harris Fetko conflagration. Harris lay on the bed with his foot in an ice pack and told, once again, the sorry tale of how his father had ruined his life and made him into all the sad things he was today. When the reporter asked him what had happened to his foot and the chair, Harris said that he had tripped while running to answer the phone.

They beat Tacoma 10-9, on a field goal in the last eight seconds of the game. Harris scrambled for the touchdown, kicked the extra point with his off foot, and then, when in the last minute of the game it became clear that none of the aging farm implements and large pieces of antique cabinetry who made up his backfield and receiving corps were going to manage to get the ball into the end zone, he himself, again with his left foot, nailed the last three points needed to keep them happy for one more day back in Regina.

When the team came off the field, they found the Kings’ owner, Irwin Selwyn, waiting in the locker room, holding an unlit cigar in one hand and a pale blue envelope in the other, looking at his two-tone loafers. The men from the front office stood around him, working their Adam’s apples up and down over the knots of their neckties. Selwyn had on blue jeans and a big yellow sweater with the word
KINGS
knit across it in blue. He stuck the cigar between his teeth, opened the blue envelope, and unfolded the letter from the league office, which with terse, unintentional elegance regretfully informed the teams and players of the NAPIFL that the standings at the end of that day’s schedule of games would be duly entered into the record books as final. Lou Sammartino, having coached his team to first place in its division and the best record in the league, wandered off into the showers and sat down. Irwin Selwyn shook everyone’s hand and had his secretary give each player a set of fancy wrenches (he owned a hardware chain) and a check for what the player would have been owed had Lou Sammartino been granted his only remaining desire. Shortly thereafter, twenty-five broken giants trudged out to the parking lot with their socket wrenches and caught the bus to the rest of their lives.