Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  "But what do you need me for?" Ethan said.

  "What do ya think? To save us. To save the Birchwood."

  "What's the Birchwood?"

  The little chief rubbed slowly at chin with one tiny brown hand. It seemed to be a gesture of annoyance.

  "This is the Birchwood. These trees—ain't ya ever noticed them? They're birch trees. Birchwood. These woods is our home. We live here."

  "And, excuse me, I'm sorry, ha, but, uh, save it from what, now?"

  Cinquefoil gave Ringfinger Brown a hard look.

  "Ta think that we done paid ya half our treasure fer this," he said bitterly.

  Ringfinger suddenly noticed a bit of fuzz on his lapel.

  The ferisher chief turned to Ethan.

  "From Coyote, o' course," he said. "Now that he done found us, he's going ta try ta lop our gall. He does that, that's the end o' the Birchwood. And that's the end o' my mob."

  Ethan was lost, and embarrassed, too. If there was one thing he hated more than anything else in the world, it was being taken for stupid. His natural tendency in such situations was to pretend that he understood for as long as was necessary until he did understand. But whatever the ferisher was talking about—lop our gall?—it sounded too important for Ethan to fake. So he turned for help to Cutbelly.

  "Who is Johnny Speakwater?" he said miserably.

  "Johnny Speakwater is the local oracle in this part of the Western Summerlands," the werefox said. "About ten years ago, he predicted that Coyote, or the Changer as he is also known, was going to find his way to the Birchwood. Listen, now, you remember I was telling you about the Tree—the Lodgepole, as these people call it."

  At these words, a groan went up from the assembled ferishers.

  "He don't even know about the Lodgepole!" Cinquefoil cried.

  "Stop givin' me the fisheye, " Ringfinger Brown snapped. "I done told you they was slim pickin's."

  "Shrunken times, indeed," the chief repeated, and all his mob nodded their heads. Ethan could see they were already very disappointed in him, and he hadn't even done anything yet.

  "Every so often," Cutbelly went on patiently, "two branches of a tree will rub right up against each other. Have you ever seen that? Every time there's a stiff enough wind. They do it so long, and so furious, that a raw place, a kind of wound, opens up in the bark on each limb where it's been rubbing. And then, over time, the wound heals over with new bark, only now, the two limbs are joined together. Into one limb. That joining or weaving together of two parts of a tree is called pleaching. And the place where they are joined is called a gall"

  "I've seen that," Ethan said. "I saw a tree in Florida one time that was like that."

  "Well, with a tree as old and as tangled-up as the Lodgepole, and with the Winds of Time blowing as stiff as they like to blow, you are bound to have some pleaching, here and there. By now it's been going on so long that these galls are all over the place. Galls mark the spots where two worlds flow into each other. And they tend to be magical places. Sacred groves, haunted pools, and so forth. Your Summerland is just such a place."

  "So, okay, Summerland is in my world and this one," Ethan said, to Cinquefoil as much as to Cutbelly, hoping to demonstrate that he was not totally hopeless. "At the same time. And that's why it never rains there?"

  "Never can tell what's going to happen around a gall," Cutbelly said. "All kinds of wonderful things. A dry sunny patch of green in a land of endless gray and drizzle is just one of the possibilities."

  "And now this Coyote wants to cut the worlds apart again?"

  Cutbelly nodded.

  "But why?" Ethan said.

  "Because that's what Coyote does, among a thousand other mad behaviors. He wanders around the Tree, with his Rade of followers, and wherever he finds the worlds pleached together he lops them right apart. But this local gall is tucked away in such a remote corner of the Worlds that he's missed it until now."

  "Okay," Ethan said. "I get it. I mean, I sort of get it. But, I mean, you know, I sort of agree with the whole idea of how I'm a, well, a kid. Like, I don't know how to use a, what, like a sword, or even ride a horse, or any of that stuff, if that's what I'm supposed to do."

  Nobody said anything for a long time. It was as if they had all been hoping in spite of themselves that Ethan was going to rise to the occasion and come up with a plan for saving Summerland. Now that hope was gone. Then, from the edge of the meadow, there was a scornful laugh. They all turned in time to see a crow—the same great black bird, Ethan would have sworn, that he and Cutbelly had seen earlier—take to the sky. Some of the ferishers unslung their bows. They nocked arrows to their bowstrings and let fly. The arrows whistled into the sky. The black bird took no notice of them. Its wings beat slowly, lazily, with a kind of insolence, as if it thought it had all the time in the world. Its rough laughter caught the breeze and trailed behind it like a mocking streamer.

  "Enough o' this," the chief said, at last, his face grim and his tone gruff and commanding. He tossed the tiny baseball to Ethan again. This time Ethan just managed to hold on to it as it came stinging into his palm. "Let's go talk ta that crazy old clam."

  THEY TROOPED ACROSS THE MEADOW, PAST THE GLEAMING ballpark, and down to the beach. Here in the Summerlands, in the Birchwood, there was no ruined hotel, no collapsed dance hall or pier. There was just the long dark stretch of muddy sand, with the ghostly trees on one side of it and the endless dark green water stretching away on the other. And, in the middle of it all, that big gray log of ancient driftwood, spiky and half-buried, on which he and his father had once sat and shared a lunch of chicken sandwiches and hot chicken soup from the thermos. Was it the same log, Ethan wondered? Could something really exist in two different worlds at the same time?

  "That bristly old chunk of wood is the gall, some say," Cutbelly told him. "The place where the worlds are jointed fast."

  They seemed in fact to be headed right toward it.

  "But I thought you said the Tree was invisible, and untouchable," Ethan said. "Immaterial."

  "Can you see love? Can you touch it?"

  "Well," Ethan said, hoping it was not a trick question. "No, love is invisible and untouchable, too."

  "And when your pap puts on that big Roosters jersey of his, and sits there watching you in the bleachers with the smile never leaving his face? And slaps palms with you after a game even though you struck out four times looking?"

  "Huh," Ethan said.

  "Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt."

  They had reached the driftwood log. At a gesture from Cinquefoil a dozen or more ferishers got down on their knees and began, slowly and with a strange tenderness, to dig in the sand underneath it. They were digging separately, but all of them stayed in the area shadowed by the upraised, snaggled roots of the log. They slipped their small hands into the sand with a hiss and then brought them out, cupped, with a soft, sucking pop. The sand they removed in this way they drizzled through their fingers, writing intricate squiggles on the smooth surface of the beach. The driblets of sand made daisies and cloverleaves and suns. At last one of ferishers cried out, pointing at the pattern her wet handful of sand had formed, like a pair of crossed lightning bolts. The other diggers gathered around her, then, and with vigor, they began to dig all together at the spot. Before long they had dug a hole that was three times taller than any of them, and twice as wide. Then there was another cry, followed by what sounded to Ethan like a loud, rude belch. Everyone laughed, and the diggers came clambering up out of the hole.

  The last three struggled out under the shared burden of the largest clam that Ethan had ever seen. It was easily as big as a large watermelon, and looked even bigger in the ferishers' small arms as they staggered up onto the beach with it. Its shell was lumpy and rugged as broken concrete. The rippled lip dripped with green water and some kind of brown slime. The ferishers set it down on the beach and then the rest of the mob circled around it. Ringfinger Brown gave
Ethan a gentle push at the small of his back.

  "Go on, boy," he said. "Listen to what Johnny Speakwater gots to say."

  Ethan stepped forward—he could almost have stepped right over the ferishers, but he felt instinctively that this would be rude. He arrived at the innermost edge of the circle just as the ferisher chief was going down on one knee in front of the clam.

  "Hey, Johnny," Cinquefoil said in a low, soft voice, calling to the clam like a man trying to wake a friend on the morning of some long-awaited exploit—a fishing trip or camp-out. "Whoa, Johnny Speakwater. All right now. Open up. We need a word with ya."

  There was a deep rumble from inside the clam, and Ethan's heart began to beat faster as he saw the briny lips of the shell part. Water came pouring out and vanished into the sand under the clam. Little by little, with an audible creak, the upper half of the clamshell lifted an inch or so off of the lower half. As it opened Ethan could see the grayish-pink glistening muscle of the thing, wet and slurping around in its pale lower jaw.

  "Burdleburbleslurpleslurpleburbleburdleslurp," said the clam, more or less.

  Cinquefoil nodded, and pointed to a pair of ferishers standing nearby. One of them reached into a leather tube, a kind of quiver that hung at his back, and pulled out a rolled sheet of what looked like parchment. The other took hold of one end, and then they stepped apart from each other, unrolling the scroll. It was a sheet of pale hide, like their clothing, a rectangle of deerskin marked all around with mysterious characters of an alphabet that Ethan didn't know. It was something like a Ouija board, only the letters had been painted by hand. The ferishers knelt down in front of the clam, and held the unfurled scroll out in front of him.

  Cinquefoil laid a hand on the top of the clam's shell, and stroked it softly, without seeming to notice what he was doing. He was lost in thought. Ethan supposed he was trying to come up with the right question for the oracle. Oracles were tricky, as Ethan knew from his reading of mythology. Often they answered the question you ought to have asked, or the one you didn't realize you were even asking. Ethan wondered what question he himself would pose to an oracular clam, given a chance.

  "Johnny," the chief said finally. "Ya done warned us that Coyote was coming. And ya was right. Ya said we ought ta fetch us a champion, and we done tried. And spent up half our dear treasury in the bargain. But look at this one, Johnny." Cinquefoil made a dismissive wave in Ethan's direction. "He's just a puppy. He ain't up ta the deal. We been watching him for a while now, and we had our hopes, but Coyote's done come sooner than ever we thought. So now, Johnny, I'm asking ya one more time. What are we ta do now? How can we stop Coyote? Where can we turn?"

  There was a pause, during which Johnny Speakwater emitted a series of fizzings and burps and irritable teakettle whistlings. The letter-scroll trembled in the ferishers' hands. From somewhere nearby came the disrespectful cackling of a crow. Then there was a deep splorp from inside Johnny Speakwater, and a jet of clear, shining water shot from between the lips of his shell. It lanced across the foot or so of air that separated the clam and the letter-scroll, and hit with a loud, thick splat against a letter that looked something like a curly U with a cross in the center of it.

  "Ah!" cried all the ferishers. Cinquefoil scratched the U-and-cross into the sand.

  One letter at a time, slowly, with deadly accuracy, Johnny Speakwater spat out his prophecy. As each wad of thick clam saliva hit the parchment, the letter affected was copied into the sand by Cinquefoil, and then wiped clean. The clam spat more quickly as he went along and then, when he had hawked up about forty-five blasts, he stopped. A faint, clammy sigh escaped him, and then his shell creaked shut again. Ferishers gathered around the inscription, many of them murmuring the words. Then one by one they turned to look at Ethan with renewed interest.

  "What does it say?" Ethan said. "Why are you all looking at me?"

  Ringfinger Brown went over to take a look at the prophecy in the sand. He rubbed at the bald place on the back of his gray head, then held out his hand to Cinquefoil. The chief handed him the stick, and the old scout scratched two fresh sentences under the strange ferisher marks.

  "That about right?" he asked the chief.

  Cinquefoil nodded.

  "What did I tell you, then," Ringfinger said. "What did I say?"

  Ethan leaned forward to see how the old man had translated the words of the oracular clam.

  FELD IS THE WANTED ONE

  FELD HAS THE STUFF HE NEEDS

  When he read these words, Ethan felt a strange warmth fill his belly. He was the wanted one—the champion. He had the stuff. He turned back to look at Johnny Speakwater, flush with gratitude toward the clam for having such faith in him when no one else did. What he saw, when he turned, made him cry out in horror.

  "The crow!" he said. "He has Johnny!"

  In all the excitement over the words of the prophecy, the prophet had been forgotten.

  "It ain't a crow," Cinquefoil said. "It's a raven. I'd lay even money it's Coyote himself."

  When their backs were turned, the great black bird must have swooped down from the trees. Now it was lurching his way skyward with the clam clutched in both talons. Its wings beat fitfully against the air. It was a huge and powerful bird, but the enormous clam was giving it problems. It dipped and staggered and listed to one side. Ethan could hear the clam whistling and burbling in desperation as it was carried away.

  Something came over Ethan then. Perhaps he was feeling charged from the vote of confidence Johnny Speakwater had given him. Or perhaps he was just angered, as any of us would be, by seeing an outrage perpetrated on an innocent clam. He had seen birds on the Fauna Channel making meals out of bivalves. He had a vision of Johnny Speakwater being dropped from the sky onto some rocks, the great stony shell shattered and lying in shards. He saw the sharp yellow beak of the raven ripping into the featureless, soft grayish-pink flesh that was all Johnny Speakwater had for a body. In any case he took off down the beach, after the raven, shouting, "Hey! You come back here! Hey!"

  The raven was not making good time under all that weight. The nearer he got to the robber bird, the angrier Ethan got. Now he was just underneath the struggling pair of wings, right at the edge of the trees. A few seconds more and he would have run out of beach. The whistling of the clam was more piteous than ever. Ethan wanted to do something to help Johnny Speakwater, to justify its faith in him, to prove to the ferishers that he was not just a raw and unformed puppy.

  There was something in Ethan's hand, round and hard and cool as a sound argument. He looked down. It was the ferisher baseball. Without considering questions of air resistance or trajectory, he heaved the ball skyward in the direction of the raven. It arced skyward and struck the bird with neat precision on the head. There was a sickening crack. The bird squawked, and fluttered, and let go of Johnny Speakwater. A moment later something heavy as a boulder and rough as a brick smacked Ethan in the chest, and he felt a blast of something warm and marine splash across his face, and then he felt his legs go out from under him. The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was the voice of the ferisher chief, Cinquefoil.

  "Sign that kid up," he said.

  CHAPTER 3

  A Whistled-up Wind

  ETHAN OPENED HIS EYES. He was lying in his bed, in his bedroom, in the pink house on top of the hill. From the singing of the birds and the softness of the gray light at the window, he guessed that it was morning. He sat up and took his wristwatch from the nightstand beside his bed. His father had designed and assembled the watch for him, using parts from a store down in Tacoma called Geek World. The face of the watch was covered in buttons—it was like a little keyboard—and there was a liquid-crystal screen. Mr. Feld had loaded the watch with all kinds of interesting and possibly useful functions, but Ethan could never figure out how to do anything with it but tell the time and the day. Which was 7:24 A.M., Saturday the ninth. Only a little more than a minute, then, since a foul-smelling werefox who called himself Cutbelly
had appeared, squatting on Ethan's chest, to extend an invitation from another world. He heard the familiar Saturday sound of his father banging around down in the kitchen.

  If this were a work of fiction, the author would now be obliged to have Ethan waste a few moments wondering if he had dreamed the events of the past few hours. Since, however, every word of this account is true, the reader will not be surprised to learn that Ethan had no doubt whatsoever that in the company of a shadowtail he had leaped from one hidden branch of the Tree of Worlds to another—to the realm that in books was sometimes called Faerie—for the second time in his life. He knew perfectly well that he really had met a sort of fairy king, there, and seen a ballpark made from a giant's bones, and rescued an oracular clam with one lucky toss of a ball. Ethan could tell the difference between the nonsensical business of a dream and the wondrous logic of a true adventure. But if Ethan had needed further proof of his having passed a few hours in the Summerlands, he need have looked no further than the book that was lying on his pillow, just beside the dent where his slumbering head had been.

  It was small—of course—about the size of book of matches, bound in dark green leather. On the spine was stamped, in ant-high golden letters, How to Catch Lightning and Smoke, and on the title page the author's name was given as one E. Peavine. The print inside was almost too small for Ethan to make out. He could tell from the diagrams, though, that the book concerned baseball—specifically, the position of catcher. Of all the positions in the game, this was the one, with its mysterious mask and armor, to which Ethan had always felt the most drawn. But the fact that to play catcher you really had to understand the rules of the game had always scared him away.

  He got up and went over to his desk. At the back of a drawer, under the detritus of several fine hobbies that had never quite taken, among them stamp collecting, rock collecting, and the weaving of pot holders from colored elastic bands, Ethan found a magnifying glass his father had given him for his eleventh birthday. Mr. Feld was a passionate collector of both stamps and rocks. (He also wove a pretty decent pot holder.) Ethan climbed back into bed, pulled the blanket up over himself, and, with the help of the glass, began to read the introduction.