Werewolves in Their Youth (21 page)

“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.

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.

“Hi, there,” she said. “Brenda.”

She held out her hand, angled with a textbook display of confidence.

“Jake,” he said.

“I was wondering if you wanted to dance with me—” She registered the way Jake’s mouth hung open, the way Grace shifted a little on her stool. “But if you two are together I’ll just go back over to my table there and shoot myself.”

Jake turned to Grace, with a face that begged for mercy, his mouth forming inaudible words. Grace held out her hand to the girl and they shook.

“Grace.”

“Hi. Brenda.”

There was a wordless moment. “We’re just friends,” said Grace, with an embarrassed laugh. “Go on and dance, Jake.”

The contrast between Olivier’s and Jake’s styles of dancing, had there been anyone in the bar sober or interested enough to notice it, was marked. Jake seemed somehow to wear not just his clothes but his entire body too tightly. He chopped at the air with his hands. He and Brenda didn’t speak to each other—the crowd on the dance floor had forced them up against the jukebox, which was clanging loudly with Tom Petty’s cover of “Feel a Whole Lot Better.” Brenda’s best friend, Sharon Toole, shimmied up alongside her at one point, rolling a mocking but not unfriendly eye in the direction of Jake’s dogged, cramped performance, and the two of them exchanged a smile.

Jake’s departure from his place at the bar seemed to increase the male traffic around Grace. She remained folded carefully up into herself, legs crossed at the knee and then again at the ankle, fingers fitted carefully around the throat of her beer, but there was a perceptible rise in the volume and good humor along the adjacent barstools in Jake’s absence.

Among those whom Grace found herself talking to was Lester Foley, who had come right toward her, in his off-kilter headlong style, head angled one way, shoulders another, listing to one side like Groucho Marx after a severe blow to the head. He had been drinking for an hour now and was at the nightly peak, such as it was, of his physical aplomb and his powers of concentration. At some point he had gone back into the men’s room to run cold water through his hair and comb it back neatly with his pocket comb. There were still a number of feathers in his beard.

He reached out his right hand, with its three grimy fingers.

“Now you stepped in it,” he said. He laughed a wicked little laugh.

“Pardon me?”

“I told you this would happen. I told everyone. Hell, I even told myself!”

“Leave her alone, Your Honor,” said Mike Veal, looking a little uneasy. “Just ignore him,” he said to Grace.

She had not let go of his hand.

“Lester,” she said. “They used to call you Les.”

“No more or less,” he said, automatically.

“Do you remember me?”

“Sure I do,” said Lester, without any great sincerity.

“My parents had the place next door. Next to the Lichtys.”

He pulled his hand from hers. “The Lichtys.” He scowled and squinted at her as if trying to read a surprising text printed in very small characters on her face. His wrinkles smoothed out, leaving a staff of clean pink lines on his forehead. The color left his cheeks. He was working harder than he had in quite some time.

“I used to hang around with Dane a lot,” said Grace. “Their son. I braided your hair once, you probably don’t remember. I used to give Dane these crazy things, with seaweed braided in, and little sand dollars and junk we found on the beach.” She had started to braid the air on either side of her head, but now she put a hand to her mouth and laughed, as if she had embarrassed herself again.

“Grace Meadows,” he said. “Blond girl?” He looked for confirmation of this recollected scrap of a summer fifteen years before. “Dane’s girlfriend? Used to ride around on that motorbike of his. Go swimming with him in that cold, cold water. Always smoking my cigarettes. Grace Meadows, that you?”

“That was me,” said Grace, too softly to be heard over the music.

“Uh-huh. Well.” Lester stopped squinting, and left off trying to read her face. He rummaged around in the pocket of his filthy down coat and pulled out a surprisingly crisp one-dollar bill. “Well. You were crazy then, and I don’t doubt that you are probably crazy today. Everyone is crazy nowadays, which looking around I’m sure you probably noticed by now.” He laid the dollar bill on the bar. “A beer, please, Mr. Mike.”

“Put that away,” said Mike, flicking the dollar back toward Lester. He drew a pint and handed it to him. “But after this one you’re cut off.”

Lester opened his mouth to protest, but a big blond hand clapped him on the shoulder.

“Good evening, there, Mr. Mayor,” said Olivier.

“Oh, no,” said Lester. He peeled himself out from under Olivier’s hand, and, with a last squint sidewise at Grace, ducked around to the farthest corner of the bar, where he stood for a time with his knobby fingers wrapped around the untouched pint of Rainier.

“I love that guy,” said Olivier without apparent affection. He looked avidly at Grace, his eyes crinkling in a way that some uncharitable islanders might have described as patented, or even ominous.

“I thought I’d see you here,” he said.

“I’m having a hard time believing it, myself,” said Grace.

“Why didn’t you come tomorrow, like I told you? We aren’t playing tonight.”

Olivier was the drummer for a local band known variously as the Tailchasers, the Chubb Island Four Piece, and Olivier and Bo and Johnny. They had a more or less permanent ongoing engagement at each of the four island taverns, which is to say that they played nearly every Saturday night at one of them, until the complaints mounted or Olivier got into a violent dispute with the proprietors, at which point, sufficient time having elapsed in the interval since their last appearance, they moved along to the next stop in the circuit.