Werewolves in Their Youth. Michael Chabon

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СКАЧАТЬ me of. As if this were not bad enough, I had to go around with a thick wad of electrician’s tape on the hinge of my eyeglasses and a huge Western-style tooled-leather belt stuffed one and a half times around the loops of my trousers. It had been my father’s belt, and bore his name, Melvin, stamped along its length, in big yellow capital letters set amid bright green cacti, like a cheery frontier invitation for all to come and yank my underpants up into my crack. I sat alone at lunch under an invisible and mysterious hood of tomato smell – a scent dangerously similar to the acrid tang of vomit – walked myself home from school, and figured in all the dramas, ceremonials, and epic struggles of my classmates only in the unlikely but mythologically requisite role of King of the Retards. Timothy Stokes, I knew, as I followed Mrs. Gladfelter down the long, silent hallway to the office, hating him more and more with each step, was my only friend.

      He was sitting in a corner of the office, trapped in an orange vinyl armchair. There was a roman numeral three scratched into his left cheek and his brilliant white shirt and trousers were patterned with a camouflage of grass and dirt and asphalt. His chest swelled and then subsided deeply, swelled and subsided. Mr. Buterbaugh, the principal, was standing over him, arms folded across his chest. He was watching Timothy, looking amazed and skeptical and somehow offended. Mrs. Maloney, the school secretary, who a dozen times a month typed the cruel words “tomato soup” onto the cafeteria menus that my mother cruelly affixed with a magnet to our refrigerator, rose from behind her desk when we came in, and gathered up her purse and sweater.

      “I finally reached Timothy’s mother, Mrs. Gladfelter,” she said. “She was at work, but she said she would be here as soon as she could.” She lowered her voice. “And we called Dr. Schachter, too. His office said he’d call back.” She cleared her throat. “So I’m going to take my break now.”

      At two o’clock every day, I knew, Mrs. Maloney sneaked around to the windowless side of the school building and stood behind the power transformer, smoking an Eve cigarette. I turned, with a sinking heart, and looked at the clock over the door to Mr. Buterbaugh’s office. I hadn’t missed the whole afternoon, after all, lying there in the ditch for what had seemed to me like many hours. There was still another ninety minutes to be gotten through.

      “Well, now, Timothy.” Mrs. Gladfelter took me by the shoulders and maneuvered me around her. “Look who I found,” she said.

      “Hey, Timothy,” I said.

      Timothy didn’t look up. Mrs. Gladfelter gave me a gentle push toward him, in the small of my back.

      “Why don’t you sit down, Paul?”

      “No.” I stiffened, and pushed the other way.

      “Please sit down, Paul,” said Mr. Buterbaugh, showing me his teeth. Although his last name forced him to adopt a somewhat remote and disciplinarian manner with the other kids at Copland, Mr. Buterbaugh always took pains with me. He made me swap high fives with him and kept up with my grades. At first I had attributed his kindness to the fact that he was a little heavy and had probably been a fat kid, too, but then I kept hearing from my mother about how she had run into Bob Buterbaugh at this singles’ bar or that party and he had said the nicest things about me. I stopped pushing against Mrs. Gladfelter and let myself be steered toward the row of orange chairs. “That’s the way. Sit down and wait with Timothy until his mother gets here.”

      “Mr. B. and I will be sitting right inside his office, Paul.”

      “No!” I didn’t want to be left alone with Timothy, not because I was afraid of him but because I was afraid that somebody would come into the office and see us sitting there, two matching rejects in matching orange chairs.

      “That’s enough now, Paul,” said Mr. Buterbaugh, his friendly smile looking more false than usual. I could see that he was very angry. “Sit down.”

      “It’s all right,” said Mrs. Gladfelter. “You see what you can do about helping Timothy turn back into Timothy. We’re just going to give you a little privacy.” She followed Mr. Buterbaugh into his office and then poked her head back around the door. “I’m going to leave this door open, in case you need us. All right?”

      “This much,” I said, holding my hands six inches apart.

      There were three chairs next to Timothy’s. I took the farthest, and showed him my back, so that anyone passing by the windows of the office would not be able to conclude that he and I were engaged in any sort of conversation at all.

      “Are you expelled?” I said. There was no reply. “Are you, Timothy?” Again he said nothing, and I couldn’t stop myself from turning around to look at him. “Timothy, are you expelled?”

      “I’m not Timothy, Professor,” said Timothy, gravely but not without a certain air of satisfaction. He didn’t look at me. “I’m afraid your precious antidote didn’t work.”

      “Come on, Timothy,” I said. “Cut it out. The moon’s not even full today.”

      Now he turned the werewolf glint of his regard toward me. “Where were you?” he said. “I was looking for you.”

      “I was in the ditch.”

      “With the ants?”

      I nodded.

      “I heard you talking to them before.”

      “So?”

      “So, are you Ant-Man?”

      “No, dummy.”

      “Why not?”

      “Because, I’m not anybody. You’re not anybody, either.”

      We fell silent for a while and just sat there, not looking at each other, kicking at the legs of our chairs. I could hear Mrs. Gladfelter and Mr. Buterbaugh talking softly in his office; Mr. Buterbaugh called her Elizabeth. The telephone rang. A light flashed twice on Mrs. Maloney’s phone, then held steady.

      “Thanks for calling back, Joel,” I heard Mr. Buterbaugh say. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

      “I went to see Dr. Schachter a couple times,” I said. “He had Micronauts and the Fembots.”

      “He has Stretch Armstrong, too.”

      “I know.”

      “Why did you go see him? Did your mother make you?”

      “Yeah,” I said.

      “How come?”

      “I don’t know. She said I was having problems. With my anger, or I don’t know.” Actually, she had said – and at first Dr. Schachter had concurred – that I needed to learn to “manage” my anger. This was a diagnosis that I never understood, since it seemed to me that I had no problems at all managing my anger. It was my judgment that I managed it much better than my parents managed theirs, and even Dr. Schachter had to agree with that. In fact, the last time I saw him, he suggested that I try to stop managing my anger quite so well. “I don’t know,” I said to Timothy. “I guess I was mad about my dad and things.”

      “He had to go to jail.”

      “Just for one night.”

      “How come?”

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