Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  One afternoon, amid the long shadows and bright grass of a ferisher ballfield at the summit of Sidewinder Path, with the score knotted at four apiece, Ethan caught his first glimpse of Applelawn. It was just as he was rising to his feet to start the happy little around-the-horn ceremony (catcher to first base to second to shortstop to third and then home again) that his infield performed after every strikeout. The sun had been caught behind a towering stand of alders for the last few innings, but now as it moved clear of the trees something sparkled, far in the distance. It was just that—a faint metallic glint, as of a coin, a lost hubcap, a pool of water, a heat mirage. But as Ethan stood there, watching that far-off sparkle of the Farthest Territory beyond the wide green river valley, and the next batter came swaggering up to the plate, smelling of tobacco, and Jennifer T. rearranged the dirt of the pitcher's mound with a thoughtful toe for the nine hundredth time, and the shadows lengthened, and the hummingbirds made their sounds of kissing the air as they thrummed among the rhododendrons, and Cinquefoil and Pettipaw kept up their steady low chatter "Easy-out-easy-batter-two-down-come-on-kid-you-can-get-him-guy-couldn't-hit-a-bull-in-the-butt-with-a-shovel," and the ferisher baseball lay warm and almost animate, a living thing, in his fingers, he recalled Peavine's words: "A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day."

  And then, nine days after leaving Dandelion Hill, in a patch of green scrub and blackberries near a ghost town called Dutch Courage, they ran out of gas. It happened all at once, without warning. One minute they were puttering along, with the wind flowing in through the open windows of the car, and the next they were rolling to an ignoble stop in a cloud of their own dust. The air was tinged with smoke that turned the sunlight, even in the afternoon, a wistful golden color, the very color of homesickness. The river was always before them, now, a reddish-bronze band twisting like a copperhead through the lush green bottomlands. It was so wide that as they came down to its level they could no longer see its other side—it might have been an ocean, muddy and dull. It was Thor Wignutt's opinion, based on careful study of the Four-Sided Map, that at Skid's top speed of fifteen miles per hour (running on enchanted fuel, magically stretched to last longer), they were at least three days drive from Old Cat Landing, from which they hoped to cross that wide bronze river to Applelawn. On foot—a bunch of children and various foot-high beings—it would take them much, much longer to get there.

  "This is not good," said Jennifer T.

  According to the tiny doomsday scoreboard in the corner of Ethan's wristwatch, it was now the Top of the Seventh Inning. What was more, the pace of the Game of Worlds, or whatever you wanted to call it, seemed to be accelerating. Ragged Rock was coming faster now. Just yesterday the little indicator had read Bottom of the Fifth. Baseball games were like that. Get a pitcher into a jam, send a bunch of guys to the plate, and half an inning could take an hour to play. And then the next two full innings might fly past in under thirty minutes. Baseball moved at a Coyote pace, now wandering, now moving at a steady lope, now bearing down hard and quick.

  "Top of the Seventh," Cinquefoil said, shaking his head. "Coyote must be nearly ta Outlandishton by now. And here we are with miles and miles left ta go and the greatest river in the Summerlands ta cross."

  They had all taken to consulting Ethan's watch, frequently, like a team in the hunt for a pennant watching the out-of-town scoreboard. They had the same sense of disconnected connection to the unimaginable events in the Winterlands that the Red Sox feel when the Yankees play the Orioles: there was nothing they could do to influence the outcome of that other crucial game. They just had to keep moving forward, to keep on playing their best.

  "We needs to find some fuel for this heap, and quick," Grim the Giant said. "Or we ain't never gonna make it across the river in time."

  "I wish that map of yours showed gas stations," Jennifer T. said to Thor, climbing out of the car, grateful to have stopped—even if it meant they went no further—for one reason: in the last nine days they had played three hard-fought, losing games of baseball, and bathed only once. It had never smelled wonderful inside of Skidbladnir to begin with. Fill the car up with unwashed children and eldritch creatures, put a Sasquatch on her roof, and after a while the word stench became unavoidable.

  Everyone piled out of the car, leaving the doors open to air things out. Everyone except for Ethan. He remained in the backseat, just sitting there, staring at the face of his watch. He was working on an 0-for-36 streak since they had left Dandelion Hill, and it was making him a little moody.

  "It does show gas stations," Thor said. "But only Sinclair stations." He demonstrated to Jennifer T. how the Green Side of the map was dotted, here and there, with little Sinclair Oil brontosauruses. "Those all went out of business a long time ago."

  "There's a gas can in back," Jennifer T. suggested. "Maybe we could scamper through to the Middling on foot, get gas, bring it back, put a gallon in, then go back and fill her up."

  Thor unfolded the map, whistling through his teeth, then folded and refolded it, so that it showed the green leaves of the Summerlands and on the reverse showed the leaves of Middling brown. Then he held it up to the light of the sun that had just started its long slow way down toward the crooked cap of the mountain. As he did so, the map turned pale and dappled as the waters of a stream, starred with tiny spots of light. These spots, Thor had discovered, represented places where the branches of the different worlds lay near enough for a shadowtail to leap across the gap. If you looked through one of these spots you could clearly read, reversed of course, the name of the place on the Other Side to which a place on This Side corresponded. Thor peered through the map in this way for a while, then shook his head.

  "There's no good spot to leap to the Middling until we get farther down into the valley," he said.

  "Cinquefoil?" Ethan said. "What about you? Isn't there something you could do?"

  "Once upon a time," said the ferisher. He was still trying to recover from being ironstruck, from the strain of the mighty grammers he had worked to get them airborne, from the lingering ill effects of his solitary scamper, back on Clam Island, and, at the bottom of it all, from the loss of his home and his mob to Coyote. "I mighta filled old Skid here with the everlasting gas o' grammer. But alas." He had been unable to work even the simplest firelighting grammer since Ethan had drawn out the iron from him, on the mound of Three Reubens Field.

  "We'll go on foot, then," Taffy said. "I'll carry everyone, if I have to." With this bold speech she went around to the back of the car and started to unpack their gear.

  Jennifer T. stretched, and yawned, and felt that she had to pee. A little ways up the slope she found a ferisher trail concealed among the blackberries. The bramble was thinner across the trailhead, as if it had been traveled not so long ago. The Raucous Mountains were shot through with these trails, steep punishing paths that led everywhere and nowhere, deep into fabulous mines aglow with treasure, from which you would never be permitted to escape alive, or up to high and dry ledges where you lay down amid the bones of your unlucky predecessors and died.

  Jennifer T. squatted down behind a scrub pine. Everybody else—even Spider-Rose and Taffy—did their peeing right in front of the rest of the party. But Jennifer T. liked her privacy. They spent all the rest of their time together—eating, sleeping, passing the endless hours in the car. It was nice to have even a minute to yourself at the end of the day, crouched under some huge Summerlands oak or redwood, with the smell of the campfire, the bats in the dark blue air, and Taffy in the distance singing some sad, slow, endless Sasquatch tune.

  It was as she stood up again that she heard it: the weeping woman—La Llorona. Pettipaw the wererat had told them the story of this ghostmother who had, in life, been led by a trick or a promise of the rascal Coyote into killing or abandoning her own children, and then was ever after doomed to roam the Far Territories, and those portions of the Middling that brushed up t
o them, until the day of Ragged Rock. They had heard her terrible weeping, the racking, horrid, laughter of her sobs, at least once, on each of the preceding nine nights. Sometimes it came from very far away, sometimes from alarmingly near at hand. It was hard not to get the idea that La Llorona was following them, though for what reason none of them, not even Pettipaw, who was the richest in lore and understanding of anyone, could say or imagine. Jennifer T. shivered, now, at the sound, and ribbons of ice rippled through her belly and down her back. If you saw La Llorona, according to Pettipaw, standing at the edge of the fields where the woods began, or by the banks of a river, in her tattered white dress, it meant that you were about to die.

  When she returned to the car, Pettipaw was getting dinner together, his fire snapping and smoking merrily in the lee of some standing stones. It was a known fact, he claimed, that wererats had the most refined palates in all the Worlds, and he refused to eat anyone's cooking but his own. Grim the Giant was lying sprawled in the grass, among the stones, amiably criticizing the rat-man's technique.

  "Don't put no more of that wild garlic in there, bald-tail," he said. "You know it gasses me up."

  "Burgoo needs a bite," Pettipaw declared unanswerably.

  Grim answered him by cutting a thunderous fart.

  "Ahh," he said contentedly, settling deeper into the grass.

  "Why is it," Pettipaw wondered aloud, not for the first time, "That the sole one of your features to turn out properly giant-sized should be your flatulence?"

  But he scraped away, into the dirt, some of the wild garlic he had been chopping, before sliding the rest of it into his bubbling stew.

  Thor and Cinquefoil were practicing fielding one-hops. Thor was learning to play right field, which was the position they regularly had to fill, being only eight in number, with a player from the opposite team. Though ferishers took the game so seriously that you could usually rely on them, even against teams from their own mobs, giants were far less reliable. And now that the Shadowtails had reached the Lost Camps they would, according to Pettipaw, soon face teams made up of a different sort of untrustworthy creature: human beings. Or at least some version of human beings; Jennifer T. didn't quite understand exactly who, or what, were the denizens of the Lost Camps. At any rate, Cinquefoil was hitting sharp little bouncers to Thor and having him go down on one knee, to his left, to his right, now charging the ball, now waiting on it, over and over again. Jennifer T. stood for a while, enjoying the mechanical crack-spluff-thwop as the ball left the bat, dusted the grass, and then settled comfortably into Thor's mitt. Then she heard Spider-Rose huffing and whooping, down at the bottom of the clearing. The ferisher girl had found a creek, and was having herself what looked to be a fine, freezing-cold bath. As for Ethan, he was still, she saw, sitting in the back seat of Skidbladnir. Jennifer T. ached to strip off her clothes and join Spider-Rose down in the creek for her first real bath in longer than she cared to remember. But instead she went over to see what it was that was so bothering Ethan Feld.

  He hadn't moved, but she saw that he had on the dark glasses, and her heart sank. While she didn't blame him for wearing them, she supposed, she couldn't understand why wearing them didn't give him the creeps. To Jennifer T., wearing them felt like wearing another person's hair. Touching them was like touching your hand after it had fallen asleep—it was your hand, but it felt like somebody else's. She had tried them, once or twice, looking for clues as to Mr. Feld's whereabouts, or just hoping to catch a glimpse of the man. Everyone had. But with Ethan, wearing the dark glasses had become almost an obsession. He would sit for hours, perfectly still, breathing through his mouth, looking as stunned as Darrin and Dirk sitting in front of pro wresding or Power Rangers. This in spite of the fact that the image transmitted by the inky lenses of the glasses had grown increasingly dim and fragmentary over time, harder to see. The glasses themselves had darkened to a color like stained teeth, and now, she saw, they had even started to shrivel like the skin of a very old pear. It was as if Padfoot's glasses, which had always felt weirdly alive somehow, were, like cut flowers, slowly withering.

  "Hey," she said.

  "Hey."

  "What's up?"

  Ethan didn't answer. He just sat there, staring into the dark lenses, picking with a fingernail at a sticky patch on the vinyl of the driver's seat.

  "Yo, Feld," she said, punching him on the arm. "What are you doing, Holmes? Is he there?"

  That was the other sort of disturbing thing about Ethan's increasing use of the dark glasses. As the quality of the images deteriorated, Mr. Feld also appeared in the lenses less and less often. When he did appear, his face was often averted, or tilted down. You could see that he was concentrating on some work of his hands. The work itself, and his face as he performed it, could not be seen. And as the weeks passed, Padfoot seemed to have less and less to do with Mr. Feld. It had been days since Ethan had caught a glimpse of him.

  "Nope," he said softly. "He's not there."

  "Then what are you looking at?"

  Ethan didn't answer at first. Then he said,

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing?" said Jennifer T. "Nothing nothing?"

  She snatched the glasses from his face and, holding her breath, slid them on. They had gone cold as a mushroom. Her skin crawled, and she ripped them off her face again. But before she did, she saw that the images of the Winterlands, which had been flickering and dimming for days, were gone. The glasses had truly gone dark.

  "Get rid of these things," she said. She was tempted just to toss them into the trees, but that would have been mean. So she handed them back. "Jeez."

  Ethan sat, turning them over and over in hands.

  "We aren't going to make it," he said. "It's already the Top of the Seventh."

  "Stay positive," she said. "We'll make it. We'll find him."

  "That's what I'm sort of, like, starting to worry about," he said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I don't know. It's just—the last time I saw him. The last time the glasses really worked. I saw something.…He looked…"

  "What?"

  "I don't know." But he shuddered, and she saw that he did know. He just didn't want to say. "It was like something from a bad dream. It was my father, but I knew it wasn't my father."

  "They were malfunctioning," she assured him. "Now they're dead."

  "Yeah," Ethan said. His smile looked a little brave. "That was probably the thing."

  He put a hand on the door handle, then left it there without opening the door.

  "Did you hear her?" he said.

  Jennifer T. nodded. She knew that Ethan's mother had broken his heart, too, by leaving him. She could imagine how it felt to him to listen to the sobbing of that wild old La Llorona, night after night.

  "Whatever," he said.

  He tossed the glasses onto the floor of the car. He got out of the car, and they went over to see what they could do to help with dinner.

  "You can keep out of the way until it's time to wash the dishes," Pettipaw said, shooing them away with a flick of his tail. He was a deadly hunter—he hunted with his bare hands and the twin daggers of his foreteeth—with a special fondness for ground squirrel. Tonight he was boiling up a fine ground-squirrel burgoo. "Maybe you can figure out what became of the megaloped."

  This was his nickname for Taffy. Jennifer T. looked around, and realized she had not seen the Sasquatch since her announcement that if need be she would carry them all down to the river. Now, Jennifer T. saw, their gear stood stacked in orderly piles, or laid to dry or air out on the rocks, all with the Sasquatch's telltale neatness. But there was no sign of Taffy herself. They hiked back up to the trail Jennifer T. had found, then down to the stream to ask Spider-Rose if she had seen Taffy.

  "Nope," the ferisher said. She had her little doll-brother—its name was Nubakaduba (Old Fatidic for "little rocket")—in the stream with her, and just now she was beating its woolly hair clean with a small, flat stone. Since leaving her native kn
oll, her temperament, if not her outlook on life, had improved somewhat, but she was if anything more attached to the tattered remnant of her lost brother than ever. She sang to it endlessly at night, lulling herself to sleep. She drove Pettipaw wild with her demand that he provide her brother with a bowl of supper every night, suitably mashed. And woe to the one who inadvertently sat on or squashed Nubakaduba in the backseat of the car. "But I think she said she was going for a walk."

  "Was that before or after La Llorona started up?" Jennifer T. wanted to know.

  "Couldn't say. After, I guess. Why?"

  "No reason," Jennifer T. said.

  Shaking off her misgivings, she chased Ethan away, and had a brief, frigid, glorious bath in the stream, washing out her socks and underwear and laying them to dry on a stone. Then she changed into her other clean set of clothes and went to find Ethan. He was sitting by the fire, working over the handle of his bat, which someone—Jennifer T. wasn't sure anymore just who—had dubbed "Splinter." She had to admire Ethan for his persistence, or maybe it was loyalty. He had decided that, though it caused him to swing late, to swing early, to swing too soft and too hard, to swing himself right out his shoes, he was meant for Splinter, and Splinter for him. In spite of its failure to perform on the field, it had, after all, slain a skriker and healed Cinquefoil. But something must be done about the Knot. And so night after night, he sat glumly working it over with the wicked blade of Grimalkin John's hunting knife. But though the knife blade was finger-severing sharp, all his hours of dutiful scraping failed to do more than peel away a few scant fingernail-parings of ash. It was as though the Knot were not wood at all, but iron or stone.