Werewolves in Their Youth. Michael Chabon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ thrown last weekend to celebrate the closing of her first really big sale, he broke a window, knocked over a chafing dish, which set fire to a batik picture of Jerusalem, and raised a bloody blue plum under my mother’s right eye. People had tended to blame the unaccustomed effects of the fifth of Gilbey’s that was later found in the glove compartment of his car. Only my mother and I knew that he was secretly a madman.

      “Did you visit him in jail?”

      “No, stupid. God! You’re such a retard! You belong in Special School, Timothy. I hope they make you eat special food and wear a special helmet or something.” I heard the distant slam of the school’s front door, and then a pair of hard shoes knocking along the hall. “Here comes your retard mother,” I said.

      “What kind of special helmet?” said Timothy. It was never very easy to hurt his feelings. “Ant-Man wears a helmet.”

      Mrs. Stokes entered the office. She was a tall, thin woman, much older than my mother, with long gray hair and red, veiny hands. She wore clogs with white kneesocks, and in the evenings after dinner she went onto her deck and smoked a pipe. Every morning she made Timothy pancakes for his breakfast, which sounded okay until you found out that she put things in them like carrots and leftover pieces of corn.

      “Oh, hello, Paul,” she said, in her Eeyore voice.

      “Mrs. Stokes,” said Mrs. Gladfelter, coming out of the principal’s office. She smiled. “It’s been kind of a long afternoon for Timothy, I’m afraid.”

      “How is Virginia?” said Mrs. Stokes. She still hadn’t looked at Timothy.

      “Oh, she’ll be fine,” Mr. Buterbaugh said. “Just a little shaken up. We sent her home early. Of course,” he added, “her parents are going to want to speak to you.”

      “Of course,” said Mrs. Stokes. I saw that she was still wearing her white apron and her photo name tag from her job. She worked at the bone factory out in the Huxley Industrial Park, where they made plastic skulls and skeletons for medical schools. It was her job to string together all the delicate beadwork of the hands and feet. “I’m ready to do whatever you think would be best for Timothy.”

      “I’m not Timothy,” said Timothy.

      “Oh, please, Timmy, stop this nonsense for once.”

      “I’m cursed.” He leaned over and brought his face very close to mine. “Tell them about the curse, Professor.”

      I looked at Timothy, and for the first time saw that a thin, dark down of wolfish hair had grown upon his cheek. Then I looked at Mr. Buterbaugh, and found that he was watching me with an air of earnest expectancy, as though he honestly thought there might be an eternal black-magical curse on Timothy and was more than willing to listen to anything I might have to say on the subject. I shrugged.

      “Are you going to make him go to Special School?” I said.

      “All right, Paul, thank you,” said Mrs. Gladfelter. “You may go back to class now. We’re watching a movie with Mrs. Hampt’s class this afternoon.”

      Mrs. Maloney had reappeared in the doorway, her cheeks flushed, her lipstick fresh, smelling of cigarette.

      “I’ll see that he gets there,” she said – uncharitably, I thought.

      “See you later, Timothy,” I said. He didn’t answer me; he had started to growl again. As I followed Mrs. Maloney out of the office I looked back and saw Mr. Buterbaugh and Mrs. Gladfelter and poor old Mrs. Stokes standing in a hopeless circle around Timothy. I thought for a second, and then I turned back toward them and raised an imaginary rifle to my shoulder.

      “This is a dart gun,” I announced. Everyone looked at me, but I was talking to Timothy now. I was almost but not quite embarrassed. “It’s filled with darts of my special antidote, and I made it stronger than it used to be, and it’s going to work this time. And also, um, there’s a tranquilizer mixed in.”

      Timothy looked up, and bared his teeth at me, and I took aim right between his eyes. I jerked my hands twice, and went fwup! fwup! Timothy’s head snapped back, and his eyelids fluttered. He shook himself all over. He swallowed, once. Then he held his hands out before him, as if wondering at their hairless pallor.

      “It seems to have worked,” he said, his voice cool and reasonable and fine. Anyone could see he was still playing his endless game, but all the grown-ups, Mr. Buterbaugh in particular, looked very pleased with both of us.

      “Thank you very much, Paul.” Mr. Buterbaugh gave me a pat on the head. “Remember to say hello to your mother for me.”

      “I’m not Paul,” I said, and everybody laughed but Timothy Stokes.

      

      When I got home from school my mother was down in the basement, at my father’s workbench, dressed in the paint-spattered blue jeans and hooded sweatshirt she put on whenever it was time to do dirty work. She had pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail. Normally I would have been glad to see her home from work already and dressed this way. One of the sources of friction between us, and among the various angers that I had supposedly been attempting to manage, was my dislike of the way she looked as she went off to work in the morning, in her plaid suit jackets, her tan stockings, her blouses with their little silk bow ties, her cabasset of hairsprayed hair. In the days before she went back to work my mother had been a genuine hippie – bushy-headed, legs unshaven, dressed in vast dresses with Indian patterns; she was there to fix bowls of hot whole-grain cereal in the morning and to give me a snack of dried pineapple and milk in the kitchen when I came home. Now, every morning, I fixed myself a breakfast of cornflakes and coffee, and when I got home I generally turned on the television and ate the box of Yodels that I purchased at High’s every day on my way back from school. But my pleasure at the sight of her in her old, ruined jeans, patched with a scrap of a genuine Mao jacket she had bought as a student at McGill, was diminished when I saw that she was dressed this way so that she could stand at my father’s workbench and toss all the delicate furniture of his home laboratory into an assortment of battered liquor cartons.

      “But, Mom,” I said, watching as she backhanded into a box an entire S-shaped rack of stoppered test tubes. The glass, in shattering, made a festive tinkle, as of little bells, and the dank basement air was quickly suffused with a harsh chemical stink of bananas and mold and burnt matches. “Those are his experiments.”

      “I know it,” said my mother, looking grave, her voice filled with vandalistic glee. My father was a research chemist for the Food and Drug Administration. He was a small man with a scraggly gray beard and thick spectacles. He wore plaid sports jackets with patches on the elbows, carried his pens in a plastic pocket liner, and went to services every Saturday morning. He held a national ranking in chess (173) and a Canadian patent for a culture medium still widely used in that country, where he had been born and raised. “And he worked very hard on them all.” She hefted the heavy black binder in which my father kept his lab notes and dropped it into a box that had once contained bottles of Captain Morgan rum; there was a leering picture of a pirate on the side. “For years.” The laboratory notebook landed with a crunch of glass, breaking the throats of a dozen Erlenmeyer flasks beneath it. “I’ve asked him many, many times to come over here and pick up his things, Paulie. You know that. He’s had his chance.”

      “I know.” On his departure from our house, my father had taken only a plaid valise full of summer clothing and my grandfather’s Russian chess set, whose black pieces had once been fingered by Alexander Alekhine.

СКАЧАТЬ