Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  with a Seattle address and telephone number, and the e-mail address padfoot@changer.com, and the fancy white ski-bum sunglasses. His father must have finally gotten around to calling back that Padfoot guy. Perhaps something the man said over the phone had fired Mr. Feld's imagination, and he had wanted to get an early start on his work. Ethan picked up the sunglasses and tucked them into the back pocket of his jeans. Then he walked out the back door again, headed for the packing shed, his heart sinking. Now it was going to be even tougher to persuade his father to leave the island. If he were caught up in his work, hoping to impress a possible investor, leaving would be the last thing Mr. Feld would want to do.

  As soon as Ethan saw that the workshop, too, was dark, he knew that something was wrong. The high glass doors were shut but, like the house doors, unlocked. Mr. Feld never left for any length of time without locking up the workshop. It contained, as he often said, his life's savings. It would seem, then, Mr. Feld had wandered away from the house sometime, expecting to return very soon, and had not yet returned. Mr. Feld had never done anything like that before, but you never knew. No, that was untrue. You knew. You knew how it felt to come home and have everything feel somehow wrong. Too quiet. Too neat. And a smell in the air that was no smell at all, yet somehow not the proper smell of your home.

  "Dad?" Ethan called again, the fine hair rising on the back of his neck. Outside the shed, the shadows had gathered, and were pressing against the windows, blotting out the world beyond. In the windowpanes Ethan could see only his own small, staring reflection. "Oh, my God."

  Victoria Jean was gone. Ethan had been so focused on looking for his dad that he had failed to notice it before. In the place where the creamy white gondola usually rested there was only bare cement floor, mottled with oil and dust. The fuel cell unit was still there, but the envelope, tethers, and moorings were all gone, too. As he took this in, two certainties occurred to Ethan, one hard on the heels of the other. The first thing he knew for certain was that Rob Padfoot was responsible. The young man with the briefcase and long brown hair had come to the island again—had perhaps never left—and this time taken both his father and Victoria Jean away. The second certainty—he felt this one in the pit of his stomach—was that Padfoot and Brain + Storm were nothing but guises or operatives of Coyote. He remembered the way Padfoot had gone out of his way to praise the picodermal fibers of his father's envelope. Was that just a ploy? Or did Coyote really want Mr. Feld's ultrastable, nonconducting envelope material, for some reason? For the very reason, whatever it might be, that he wanted Mr. Feld, too? If any last doubt—of his own sanity, or the wisdom of his plan—had remained in the heart of Ethan Feld, it now fled. Everything, as Albert Rideout always said, was true.

  Ethan heard a faint rattle of leaves. Something was moving in the ivy just outside the doors of the packing shed. He turned, wishing he had his stick, but he had left it leaning against the bicycle. There was a low moan, the clatter of steel. And then Cinquefoil stepped into the shed. He seemed to be hiding something behind his back. There was an orange gash on his forehead, thick orange streaks on his cheeks and throat. It was the orange of apricot jam, deep and shining. There was a spreading sticky circle on his buckskin shirt. The haste of his flight across the gap between Branches had left a thick rime of ice on his shoulders and the tips of his ears. He drew himself up to his full height of perhaps sixteen inches, swept the cap from his head, and bowed low to Ethan.

  "At yer service," he said. From behind his back he produced the old catcher's mitt that Ethan's father had dug out of a box that morning. "I believe this might be yers."

  Then he pitched forward and fell flat on his face.

  Ethan picked up the ferisher—he weighed as much as a big cat, and his body felt like a slumbering cat's in Ethan's arms—dense and loose at the same time. He carried him over to an old couch in the corner where Mr. Feld often abandoned his researches to a few hours' sleep, and laid him gently down on the cushions. Then he stood back, and wondered if he was about to watch the beautiful, battered little creature die.

  "Not yet," Cinquefoil said, without opening his eyes. "Not this side a the Winterlands."

  "The Winterlands," Ethan said. "Is that where he lives?"

  "The Changer? He don't live anywhere. He's got no home. No home would have him, and there's none that'd suit him fer longer than a day. But he's fond a the Winterlands, they say, and all that crew of shaggurts and stormbangers and frost giants. They say his wife is a great gray shaggurt named Angry Betty. It won't surprise me none ta go looking and find him there, camped with all his Rade around him, his contraptions and contrivances, his hags and harridans and hobgoblins." Cinquefoil opened his eyes. "But I don't know fer sure; I've never set foot in the Winterlands my ownself, nor ventured inta the circle o' his wagons when he halts in his wandering fer a night. Nor has anyone I know that ever returned ta tell of it. Not in any form that I cared ta know them." He closed his eyes again.

  "Did you…did you find any of your…" Ethan didn't bother to finish his question. If Cinquefoil had found anyone alive, surely they would have come back with him. The ferisher said nothing. He just slowly shook his head.

  Ethan went to the stationary sink in the corner and filled a pail with warm water, feeling honored to have the Home Run King of three worlds in his care. The ferisher's blood seemed thicker than human blood and it had a distinctive smell that reminded Ethan of the smell of spring mud, of the first baseball practice of the season. It cleaned up easily enough, and the cuts and slashes themselves seemed to Ethan already to be healing as he dabbed at them with the damp towel. Cinquefoil sat up. He took the sponge from Ethan and tended to the rest of his wounds himself.

  "Thanks, again," he said in a soft voice. Part of his beard had been singed off, and he patted at the bald spot. "It were a helluva leap. The gap between the branches is sadly wide now, where once they was jointed t'gether like lips in a kiss. And likes o' you and me weren't never meant ta leap alone."

  "Did they come after you? Skrikers? Graylings?"

  Cinquefoil shook his head. "A quickgloom," he said. "Like a living shadow that—"

  "I know," Ethan said. "They came after us, too. They got Cutbelly."

  "That's bitter news," the ferisher said.

  "And they also got my dad, Cinquefoil. I know they did. Somebody named Rob Padfoot came and took him away, and he took the Zeppelina, too."

  "Padfoot?" said Cinquefoil. "There ain't no doubt about it. Coyote has your father."

  Ethan remembered the sunglasses. He took them out of his back pocket and turned them over in his hand. The iridescent black lenses were like two pools of spilt oil. The white stuff they were made from, a kind of stiff rubber or vinyl, soft to the touch, was shot through with thin veins of wire in a crackly pattern. The rubber or whatever it was—some modern polymer his father was no doubt familiar with—held the warmth of Ethan's pocket.

  "You know this Padfoot guy?" he said, slipping on the dark glasses. They were warmer than his pocket, somehow. As warm as if heated from within.

  "I know him," Cinquefoil said. "More's the pity. He sits at Coyote's table. Shares in his mischief and trouble. Breaks his slaves and tempts his victims and rewards his stooges and darlings. A nasty, nasty character."

  Ethan nearly took the sunglasses off, then, as though the nastiness of Rob Padfoot might be clinging to them like a sticky residue. But it was too late; the lenses covered his eyes.

  When you look through a pair of glasses, even dark glasses, you expect to see through them. You expect, that is, to perceive—more clearly, or with less glare—the world that lies directly before your eyes. This expectation is rooted so deep that it took Ethan's brain a moment—a strange, nauseating moment—to realize that the signals it was getting from Ethan's optic nerves had nothing at all to do with the workshop, the old couch in the corner, or the wounded ferisher chieftain. It was another moment more before his baffled brain was able to form a definite impression from the mass of gr
ayish and whitish and bluish blobs his eyes were claiming they saw.

  "I see him!" he shouted, gripping the earpieces tightly in his fingers. "Oh, my God, I see him!"

  "Padfoot?"

  "No," Ethan said. "My father!"

  He saw him dimly, as through a layer of thin black oil, and the image was oddly jerky, swooping back and forth and up and down. Mr. Feld was lying on a square mattress or pad, with a blank wall behind him. He was lying on his side, with a couple of inches of his belly showing at the waist of his jeans. Only his chest was moving, expanding and contracting with his breath, and he might have been asleep. It was impossible to say for sure, because the entire upper half of his face was covered in a blindfold. But that was his father's furry belly, there was no doubt about it. And that was Mr. Feld's big old chunky wristwatch. Though his father appeared to be at peace, there was something about the blindfold and the barren mattress that terrified Ethan. His father was a prisoner, a hostage. Maybe he was even being tortured. The image in the glasses had that awful shuddering quality you saw in footage taken by terrorists and kidnappers.

  "I'm going to get my dad," he said, tentatively, realizing his plan and testing it aloud at the same time. He took off the sunglasses and returned them to his pocket. "I'm going to get my dad," he repeated, more firmly. He didn't care, all at once, about the end of the universe. He didn't care about being a hero, about Johnny Speakwater's prophecy or the things there might be inside of him that had led Ringfinger Brown to single him out as a hot prospect. All he wanted to do was get his poor, blindfolded father back. He had lost one of his parents already in his short life. If he needed to save the universe to get the other one back, then he would. "Can you, like, guide me? Help me out?"

  Cinquefoil rubbed his hands over his broad impassive face and sighed. "By the Starboard Arm, I'm tired, little reuben." Now that he had recovered somewhat from his wounds and the strain of crossing, the loss that he and his tribe had suffered seemed to settle on him all at once. "Tired and beaten and old."

  "If Coyote took my father, it might have something to do with Ragged Rock. I think he wanted this stuff my father has figured out how to make. You can't burn it or tear it or cut it. It's pretty cool stuff and—oh. Wait."

  "What?" said the ferisher. "What is it?"

  "Stuff," Ethan said, feeling the bottom fall out of his stomach. "I think w e…I think there's been a mistake."

  "What are ya talking about?" Cinquefoil said.

  " 'Feld is the wanted one,'" Ethan quoted. " 'Feld has the stuff he needs.' It wasn't me. It was my dad. My dad has the stuff—his picodermal fibers. And the 'he' is Coyote! See? All along, Johnny Speakwater wasn't talking about me Feld. He was talking about Feld, my father. My father has the stuff Coyote needs. And what he needs it for is to poison the Well!"

  "Yer getting too far ahead of me," the ferisher said, a hand to his brow. "Slow it down."

  "You know my friend? Jennifer T. Rideout? Well, her aunt had this dream, see, about a magic Well that feeds the Tree? And in the dream a coyote was, you know. Peeing in the water. Ruining it. Poisoning it."

  "Murmury," said the ferisher.

  "What did you say?"

  "Murmury Well. It's in the Greenmelt. The part of the Winterlands that lies nearest to the heart of the worlds. Yes, if he can rigger a way ta foul those waters, the Tree is doomed and that's fer sure. And then comes Ragged Rock, in a Mole year, just like the old folks always said it would. And we're the ones what put yer pap in the Coyote's way. We brung him up this way, with those airship dreams. We parked him right next ta a gall, where Coyote was bound ta take notice someday." His voice went soft and frayed at the edges. "It's all our fault."

  They said nothing for a long time. Ethan felt the last sparkling residue of being a prophesied hero drain away. But as it departed he found he was left with a strange kind of thoroughly unmagical resolve. He was not the wanted one. Well, that was fine. He might not be the one to save the universe. But he was going to save his father. That was something that had nothing to do with the vision of an oracular clam.

  "So," he said, at last. "How are we going to do this?"

  The ferisher sighed. Every ounce and inch and atom of him seemed to be rebelling against the idea of ever doing anything again but lie on this old couch. And yet he had come here, of all the places he might have gone after his search for his tribesmen failed. Ethan was beginning to get the feeling of some kind of force at work, some purpose that was driving things to happen in a certain way.

  "We don't have a shadowtail. And I've just leaped my last leap without the help of a shadowtail, that's fer damn sure." He shuddered, and gave the left side of his head a sharp whack. "I done lost all the hearing in this ear."

  "Well, we know this kid named Thor Wignutt?"

  "Thor Wignutt," Cinquefoil said, looking doubtful. He seemed to know just who Ethan was talking about.

  "To leap across. We think Thor might be—"

  "Aye," Cinquefoil said. "That one will do quite well." He climbed down from the couch and started pacing back and forth, thinking things out. "We'll need a ship or vee-hickle o' some sort," he said. "Coyote has all type o' fleet wagons and swift beasts, and turrible contrivances that travel ten times faster than ever we could afoot. We've no hope o' catching him without a ship. And should we end up after all headed inta the Winterlands, well, in all the tales I've ever heard, no hero or adventurer ever got there on the leather o' his shoes."

  "A ship," Ethan said. "Yeah, okay. Man, too bad they stole Victoria Jean. What about one of those flying buses of yours?"

  "Alas, the graylings burned 'em all. The big sky bladders o' yer pap, there was only the one? Didn't he craft none to spare?"

  "Huh," Ethan said.

  A few pieces of an idea began to arrange themselves in Ethan's mind. Key elements were still missing, but he felt somehow that Cinquefoil might be able to help work them out. He went to one of the big storage lockers and worked the combination, which was set, like all of Mr. Feld's locks, to 10-21-80, the day on which the Philadelphia Phillies had won the World Series for the first time in the seventy-seven years of its existence. He found a handsewn polycarbon picofiber envelope, carried it outside, and laid it on the grass, turning it over and over, checking it for tears or weak patches. It was the first that Mr. Feld had had manufactured, a prototype, which he had never actually used to make an ascent. Ethan carried the untested envelope and all the wire tackle he could find down to the driveway.

  Cinquefoil dragged himself from the couch and trudged down the hill to watch as Ethan spent most of the next hour threading cables, setting clasps, and double-checking all his connections. He helped Ethan wrestle a gas regulator unit onto a dolly and wheel it down to the driveway, too, along with a big tank of helium. Ethan connected the regulator to the rubberized valve on the envelope. Then he pushed a button on the regulator, and with a loud metallic whoosh the gas flew through the hose. The gas bag lurched, rumbled, and then with a crinkling sound expanded, all at once, billowing out at either end, bobbing and thrumming, rising into the air to the limits of the stay cables and then beyond.

  Gently, gracefully, the orange Saab station wagon rose three and a half feet off the ground. Cinquefoil clapped his hands, losing his sorrowful mien for a moment in the simple delight of seeing something extremely heavy floating easily as a bit of dandelion fluff.

  "Yeah. Neat. There's only one problem," Ethan said. "It's a dummy."

  Cinquefoil looked puzzled.

  "I mean, it floats all right. But there's no propulsion. You know? And there's no tiller. I mean, I could turn on the engine, and spin the steering wheel, but they're not—you know. They're for a car."

  Cinquefoil's smile had returned. "There isn't no problem, then."

  "There isn't?"

  "What da ya think makes a ferisher bus go forward, or left, or right? Racks and pinions? Gasoline?"

  "Right," Ethan said.

  "Go get what ya'll need from the house," Cinquefoil said.
"I'll start working the grammer."

  Ethan went into the house and changed into clean, warm clothes. He put on thermal underwear and packed two more sets in his duffel, along with several sweaters, three pairs of clean underpants, and lots of socks. It could get awfully cold up in the sky. He packed Peavine's book, and a toothbrush. Then he went into his father's bedroom. Mr. Feld was a naturally sloppy man, but Ethan's mom had been a neatnik, and in the days of their marriage it was her way that had prevailed. Now that she was dead Ethan's dad had pretty much relapsed to his old messy ways, but he still kept the bedroom tidy. His pen-knife, pocket change, and wallet lay on the dresser, the coins neatly stacked. The bed was made, its coverlet pulled tight and smooth as the skin of a drum, and to Ethan it looked astoundingly empty. I am never going to see him again, he thought, and with a shudder tried to force the thought down. He took the dark glasses out of his pocket again and put them on. Again there was the strange warmth in the earpieces, like a pair of long fingers laid against his temples.

  This time he understood right away what he was seeing. It was a bowl, and this bowl contained some kind of dark and glistening brownish mass, a stew or soup of some kind, in which darker chunks of something swam. The bowl rose up in the direction of Ethan's face—it was the strangest sensation—and then tipped toward him. Ethan jumped back, as if hot soup were about to pour into his lap. But of course nothing of the sort occurred. The soup, and the person eating it, were somewhere far away. The view through the lenses shifted abruptly, then, slid to the left, and there was Mr. Feld again. He was still lying on the square of foam, but he had rolled over and it was impossible to see his face at all. That was when Ethan understood that when he put on Rob Padfoot's dark glasses, he could see what Rob Padfoot was seeing, way off in the Winterlands or wherever they had taken his dad. Rob Padfoot was keeping watch over Mr. Feld, in that barren room, sitting down to a meal of something glistening and foul. It was as if the dark glasses were a lost piece of Padfoot himself, still keeping in contact with the eyes and brain from which they had been parted.