Werewolves in Their Youth. Michael Chabon

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      I peered around the side of the garage, to make sure that my mother wasn’t watching from the front windows, then ran as quickly as I could toward the stand of young maples and pricker bushes that separated us from the Stokeses. The boxes were very heavy, and the shards of glass within them jingled like change. It was dinnertime, and nearly dark, but none of the lights were on in Timothy’s house. I supposed that he had been taken to see Dr. Schachter, and all at once I worried that he would never come home again, that they would just send Timothy straight off to Special School that day. Some people claimed that the little yellow van that sometimes passed us when we were on our way to school in the morning, its windows filled with the blank, cheerful faces of strange boys none of us knew, was the daily bus to Special School; but other people said that you had to go live there forever, like reform school or prison, and get visits from your parents on the weekends.

      My mother was calling me. “Pau-aul!” she cried. She was one of those women who have a hard time raising their voices; it always came out sounding hoarse and friendless whenever she called me home. “Pau-lie!”

      I hid in the brambles and studied the dark face of Timothy’s house, trying to decide what to do with my father’s things. My arms were growing tired, and I needed to go to the bathroom, and for now, I decided, I would leave the boxes at the basement door. I would come back later to ask Timothy, who on occasion appeared in the avatar of the faithful robot from Lost in Space, to guard them for me. Timothy slept in the basement of the Stokeses’ house, under a wall hung from floor to ceiling with his vast arsenal of toy swords and firearms, in a room strewn with dismembered telephones and the bones of imitation skeletons. I tiptoed around the side of the Stokeses’ house and into their weedy backyard. The moon was high and brilliant in the sky by now, and I thought that, after all, it was pretty nearly full. I approached the basement door, keeping an uneasy eye on the shadows in the trees, and the shadows under the Stokeses’ deck, and the shadows gathered on the swings of the creaking jungle gym. Since my last visit, I saw, Timothy had marked the entrance to his labyrinth with two neat pyramids of plastic skulls. My mother’s raspy voice fell silent, and there was only the sound of cars out on the country road, and the ghostly squeak of the swing set and the forlorn crooning of a blind Dalmatian that lived at the bottom of our street. Carelessly I dropped the boxes on the step, between the grinning pyramids, and ran back through the trees toward my house, heart pounding, tearing my clothes on the teeth of the underbrush, certain that something quick and terrible was following me every step of the way.

      “I’m home!” I said, coming into the brightness and warmth of our hall. “Here I am.”

      “There you are,” said my mother, though she didn’t look all that happy to see me. She laid a heavy hand on my shoulder. It smelled of butyric acid and dextrorotatory sucrose and also very faintly of Canoe. “I just got off the phone with Bob Buterbaugh, Paul. He told me what really happened at school today.” She had yanked her hair free of its ponytail and now it shot out in ragged arcs around her head, tangled like the vanes of a wrecked umbrella. “Do you want to explain yourself to me? Why did you lie?”

      “Is Dad coming over?”

      “Well, yes, he is, Paul –”

      “Great.”

      “– because he feels that he really needs to see you, tonight. But the two of you will have to sit outside in the car and talk, or go somewhere else. I’m not going to let him in the house.”

      I was astonished. “Why not?”

      “Because, Paul, your dad – you know as well as I do – he’s become, well, you know how he’s been lately. I don’t have to tell you.” As if she were angry, she folded her arms, and clenched her jaw. But I could see that she was trying to keep herself from crying. “I have to set some limits.”

      “You mean he can’t come over to our house anymore? Ever again?”

      There were tears in her eyes. “Ever again,” she said. Once more she crouched before me, and I let her take me in her arms, but I did not return her embrace. In the picture window at the end of the hall I watched her reflection hugging mine. I didn’t want to be comforted on the impending loss of my father. I wanted him not to be lost, and it seemed to me that it would be her fault if he was.

      “He said he’s going to collect his things. So I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t get rid of them, eh?” She gave me a poke in the ribs. “He must want them after all. Hey,” she said. “What is it? What’s the matter?” She followed my gaze toward the picture window, where our embracing reflections looked back at us with startled expressions.

      “Nothing,” I said. A light had just come on in the Stokeses’ house. “I – I have to go over to Timothy’s. I left something there.”

      “What?”

      “My Luger,” I said, remembering a toy I had lent to Timothy sometime last summer. “The pink one that squirts.”

      “Well, it’s time to eat,” said my mother. “You can go after.”

      “But what if Dad comes?”

      “Well, what if he does? You can go over to Timothy’s tomorrow. He’s probably not allowed to see anyone anyway.”

      

      In five minutes I bolted my dinner – one of those bizarre conglomerations of bottled tomato sauces, casseroles-in-boxes, and leftover Chinese lunches that were then the national dishes of our disordered and temporizing homeland – and ran out the front door into the night. I was sure that Timothy had found the cartons by now. What if he thought I had meant them for a present and refused to give them back? My father was going to be angry enough about my mother’s treatment of his chemistry things, but it would be worse when he found out that most of them, including his notebook, were missing. I sprinted across our yard as quickly as I could, considering my asthma, and went crashing through the maple trees toward the Stokeses’ house. There was a burst of red light as a thin branch slapped against my left eye, and I cried out, and covered my face, and ran headlong into Timothy Stokes. My chin struck his chest and I sat down hard.

      He smiled, and knelt beside me. “Are you all right, Professor?” he said. He was wearing the same pair of white jeans and stained T-shirt, under an unbuttoned jacket that was too large for him and that bore over the breast pocket his own last name, printed in block letters on a strip of cloth. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket and switched it on. The beam threw eerie shadows across his cheeks and forehead, and his little brown eyes were alight behind his glasses. I saw at once that the antidote I’d administered to him that afternoon had worn off, and he showed no sign of having been subjected to any weird therapies or electroshock helmets. His face looked as solemn and stupid as ever. He wore a rifle strapped across his back and a plastic commando knife in his boot, and three Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos hand grenades poked through the web belt of his canteen, and in his right hand he was carrying, as though it were another weapon, the thick, black, case-bound notebook.

      “That’s my father’s,” I said. “You can’t have it.”

      “I already photographed all of its contents with my spy camera,” he explained. “I have every page on microfilm. Plus I ran an extensive computer analysis on them.” He lowered his voice. “Your father is a very dangerous man. Look here.” He opened the notebook and shone the flashlight on a page where my father had written, “Myco. K. P889, L. 443, Tr. 23,” and then a date from three years earlier. The rest of the page was an illegible mishmash of numbers and abbreviations, some of them connected by sharp forceful arrows. The entry went on for СКАЧАТЬ