Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  It was Coyote, in the end, who put an end to the silence.

  "Uh-oh," he said. "We're in trouble now." He stood a moment longer, gazing up at the sky, then turned, and jammed his index and pinky fingers between his lips, and whistled. Across the field, by Murmury Well, Ethan saw his father's shape raise its hand. Then it retreated into the belly of the truck.

  "Game over!" called the Coyote, starting to run to Murmury Well. "Forfeit! You win!"

  The Hobbledehoys began to gesticulate wildly, chasing after their manager as he ran toward the truck. They were outraged with him for forfeiting; they had played very hard and were only a run down with three more outs to their name. The Shadowtails stood uneasily at the edge of the ball field, some of them watching Coyote as he ran, others staring up at the wavering little hole that Ethan's shot had poked into the glassy seal on the Gleaming. Ethan's gaze, however, was fixed on the armored truck. The crew of graylings came tumbling out of its belly, rolling a wheeled machine that Ethan recognized as a variation on the kind of pump his father used to inflate his envelopes. Then came the Flat Man, carrying the dragon's egg. Coyote took the egg from the Flat Man and unstoppered it. There was a soft piff and then a curl of black vapor snaked like a vine from the opening. Coyote raised it, and took hold of a hose on the pump.

  "Hey!" shouted Jennifer T. "You didn't win! We had a deal!"

  "So I lied!" Coyote shouted back.

  Then something large and dark and moving very quickly seemed to shudder up out of nowhere onto Coyote, and he stumbled backward.

  "Taffy!" Ethan cried. "It's Taffy! She got out!"

  Snarling, the Sasquatch wrapped her long arms around Coyote's throat. Then she snatched at his upraised hand, on whose palm there balanced the wobbling hodag egg. A black, starless hole splashed across the sky behind them. They fell over backward, but the Slipperiest One managed to slip the knot of Taffy's great furry arms, and catch the knobbly egg before it could tumble to the grass. He held it up, standing over her with a wild grin on his face. Then he tipped the egg, once, twice, and two long drizzling drops of Nothing splashed against the big leathery soles of her feet, and she bellowed in pain.

  Coyote slapped the egg to the intake valve of the picofiber pump, and the Flat Man threw a switch, and instantly the pump started up, onk-squitch-onk-squitch-onk-squitch. The silvery hose leapt once, and then again, and then it settled back shuddering to the ground.

  For a moment, for an hour, for a year, nothing happened. Then they heard another faint, familiar call, more chilling than the sound of breaking glass. It was the far-off crowing of a rooster. They felt the ground beneath their feet shudder, spasmodically, as if it were the hide of an immense animal trying to shed them like irritating flies. The air was rent with a creaking sound, like the rusted hinges of a giant door, and all about them, echoing against the hills of Applelawn and the craggy burnt brow of Shadewater Tor, came cracklings and rustlings and the groaning of ancient timbers.

  "Ragged Rock," Cinquefoil said softly, sitting down in the grass. "Two out in the Bottom of the Ninth. The count is 0 and 2."

  The werebeasts, Cutbelly and Pettipaw, whose eyes were sharper than anyone's, were the first to notice what they afterward described as a window opening in the sky. They cried out, and pointed at a spot high in the blue expanse beyond the outfield. Ethan strained his eyes, but saw nothing—and then all at once it was there, a small patch of darker blue, roughly rectangular, in the midst of which lay the jagged hole that his home run shot had made. Though darker than the sky around it the rectangle was rimmed at its edges with a paler light, and as they watched faint shadows became apparent within in it, flickering and gray.

  The shuddering of the ground grew more intense, and Ethan was knocked off his feet. When he looked up at the sky again the blue window had grown larger, and the pale blue light was pouring freely from it now, in all directions, reaching long solid shafts of blue to touch every corner of the world. Then a huge shadow passed in front of the source of the blue light from the sky, and it seemed to Ethan that this shadow had the form of a man. No, it was not a shadow at all. It was dark, but somehow it shone.

  "No! No!"

  It was the voice of Coyote. Ethan tried to look that way, but the force of gravity seemed to have grown abruptly stronger. He could not turn his head, or raise his body. He could only look at the great brilliant gap his home run had broken open in the sky-blue seal on the Gleaming.

  "No!" Coyote yelled. He was dipping down to snatch baseballs from a canvas bag at his feet, and hurling blazing fastballs at the sky. "Get back in there! Go away, you big one-eyed bully! I'm not done! I'm not done!"

  Just before the weight of Ragged Rock drew a curtain down over him, Ethan thought he saw the light around the face in the window shift and gather itself. It seemed to have formed itself into the shape of an immense arm, long, rippled with veins of lightning and a musculature of clouds. The arm reached down out of the sky, fingers spreading like the rays of a star, to grab at something that was flickering on the shore of Murmury Well, to snuff a dancing red flame.

  HOME

  EPILOGUE

  Life, the World, and Baseball,

  in the Days After the Flood

  NOT SO LONG AGO, here in the Middling, there was an hour —it may have been a period as long as sixty-three minutes—during which a number of unusual phenomena occurred. A battered old Mercedes van pulled into the courtyard of a small orphanage outside of Cuzco, Peru, and when the nine children who lived in the orphanage ran out to greet it, they found that it contained their parents, all of whom had been lost in a catastrophic mudslide three years before. In the Jura Mountains of France, a modest hydro-electric dam project, whose completion would submerge an ancient, peaceful, and attractive village, and uproot its residents, vanished overnight. Off the southern tip of Thailand, the next morning, a magnificent coral reef that had been dying for ten years was found by divers to be mad and dazzling with life. Nine thousand terminal cases around the world were informed that their cancers had gone into remission. Tens of thousands of quarreling lovers reconciled, and hundreds of runaway children found themselves with money enough to return to a home that suddenly welcomed them.

  Not all of the incidents were so dramatic. As you went farther along the branches of the Middling from Diamond Green, the effects of the unsealing of the Gleaming were less pronounced. People found beloved neckties, photographs, and lucky charms they had long given up for gone. Lifelong losers hit modest jackpots, the leaves of neglected houseplants uncurled and turned green again, and Chihuahuas whose yapping ability had been surgically removed found themselves suddenly able to bark again, and loudly repaid their owners for their cruelty. Much of the world was asleep during this enchanted hour, and on awaking the next morning many reported light and refreshing dreams in which the beloved dead returned to them, or in which, though hitherto they had never displayed any musical aptitude, they composed symphonies of genius.

  It really is a shame that through our sad neglect of wonder, hopefulness, and trust we allowed so much clutter and debris to build up in the space that once connected us to Diamond Green. Nearly all the force of the Unsealing, of the great healing flood of pent-up Spirit that flowed out of the hole broken open by Ethan's home run, was dissipated in the effort of clearing through the vast thorny tangle of the Briarpatch. In the end, most of us here received only a trickle, a gleaming droplet, of that mighty flood. In the playground that is all that remains of the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, New Jersey, for example, the sole evidence of what happened at Diamond Green was the appearance, under the swings, of a yellowed Spalding baseball mysteriously signed Van Lingle Mungo. Later that day some boys and girls came out and tossed it around.

  The good news, however, is that most of the Briarpatch was cleared away, and that the road into the land of perpetual summer, of apple blossoms and green grass, lies open to you, for the time being, at least—if you know where to look for it.

  For those who were standing d
irectly in the path of the flood, the effects were dramatic indeed. When Ethan came to himself again, he felt a dry, cool palm on his forehead that he recognized at once as belonging to his father. He sat up, and found himself under the worried scrutiny of a pair of moist brown eyes.

  "Hi, Dad," he said. It was almost a question.

  "Hi, son."

  The Feld men stared at each other, and long weeks of separation and strangeness and horror filled the silence.

  "Anything, uh, missing?" Ethan said at last, still a little uncertain.

  "Yeah, actually," said Mr. Feld. "My glasses. But, oddly, I don't seem to need them anymore. I can see your beautiful face just fine without."

  That was when Ethan finally found himself back in his father's arms, and all the strangeness and horror was washed away.

  "I found you," Ethan said. "Dad, I said I would find you, and I found you."

  "I heard all about it," said Mr. Feld. "And I'm very proud of you."

  Ethan looked around and saw his knapsack lying in the grass, not far away. He went over to it and took out his father's wallet.

  "Here," he said. "You left home without this."

  His father took the wallet with a puzzled expression.

  "That isn't like me," he said.

  "You had a little bit of a hard time, Dad," Ethan told him. "I'll explain it later."

  "Okay," Mr. Feld said.

  "It wasn't easy, Dad," Ethan said. "Finding you. I don't want you to ever go away again."

  "I won't," his father said.

  It was the kind of promise a father makes easily and sincerely, knowing at the same time that it will be impossible to keep. The truth of some promises is not as important as whether or not you can believe in them, with all your heart. A game of baseball can't really make a summer day last forever. A home run can't really heal all the broken places in our world, or in a single human heart. And there was no way that Mr. Feld could keep his promise never to leave Ethan again. All parents leave their children one day. Ethan knew that better now than he had ever known it before. But he was glad to have the promise nevertheless.

  They stopped talking for a long time, and just lay there, shoulder to shoulder, in the sunshine on the grass.

  "What's that sound?" Ethan said, at last, sitting up. "It sounds like a baby crying."

  "It's a baby crying," Mr. Feld said. "One of your, uh, little friends, seems to have come across a very small baby."

  He helped Ethan to his feet, and they walked across toward Murmury Well. There, by the cool deep wintry waters, they found Spider-Rose, holding her squalling brother in her arms, and kissing his little feet, each no bigger than a butter bean. Like all ferisher babies he was sort of rubbery and scrawny, with an elderly expression on his face, and his hair was still a hank of coarse black yarn, but there was certainly nothing unkissable about his little kicking feet.

  "It worked!" Spider-Rose exulted. "I knew it would work. Didn't I always say?"

  There were a dozen ferishers hanging around the edge of the well, lounging in the grass, laughing and mugging at the baby, and it took Ethan a moment, looking at the silly grin on Cinquefoil's face, to realize who they must be: members of the Boar Tooth mob who had been taken during the attack on the Birchwood. It was they who had formed the grayling ground crew that tended to the Diamond Green chalk lines. The pump, hose, and iron black truck had vanished; the sledge wagon had been smashed, as if by a giant fist, to splinters.

  "Hey," said Jennifer T. She and Thor came over. They stood for a moment, three points of a triangle, then fell together and hugged. As he was holding Thor, Ethan realized that something was off, something that he thought, at first, might be his friend's smell. It was a greener smell, somehow, like that of pine needles or eucalyptus. He took a step back at looked at Thor.

  "You're smaller," he said.

  Thor nodded. "Shrinking," he said. "And look." He held up his forearm, to show Ethan some scratches below his elbow. The bloody streaks were paler than they ought to be, tinged with reddish gold.

  "What is it?" Ethan said. "What's happening? Where's Coyote?"

  "Gone," Mr. Feld said. He shook his head. "They came and took him."

  He pointed toward right field, and Ethan saw that the expanse of sky over the Gleaming, formerly a vast blue blank, was now rich with clouds, mountainous and tinged purple with thunder. All along right field there now ran a giant wall, a hundred feet high, of high golden posts woven through with slats of silver. It would take a mighty swing indeed to clear those fences. At the end of the wall, right in straightaway center, there was an immense wooden gate, closed, and barred. Over the gate hung a silver banner engraved simply:

  216

  "Two-sixteen?" Ethan said. "What's that?"

  "The number of stitches in a baseball," Jennifer T. said.

  "The number of barleycorns in a fathom," said Cinquefoil. "Which is the distance from home plate to the gates of the Gleaming."

  "It's also the number of possible outcomes when you roll three dice," said Mr. Feld. It was exactly the kind of deeply irrelevant remark that Mr. Feld could always be counted on to proffer at a dramatic moment. Ethan could not resist hugging him again.

  "I once heard it said," Pettipaw intoned, "that there are two hundred and sixteen letters in Old Mr. Wood's true Name."

  "Hey," Thor said. "The four sides of my map are divided into fifty-four sections. Nine by six. And four times fifty-four is two hundred and sixteen."

  "Two hundred and sixteen?" said Rodrigo Buendía. "That the area code for Cleveland, Ohio. I got a sister in Cleveland. Great baseball town."

  Then he rolled up the legs of his trousers, and delighted in showing everyone how all of the terrible bright scars were gone.

  EVERY FLOOD HAS ITS EDDIES, ITS POCKETS OF RESISTANCE, ITS islands left inexplicably high and dry. They found Taffy lying on a barren patch of ice at the edge of the Winterlands. She was unconscious, motionless, and half-dead. Her fur was singed with frost, her lips were caked with blood. And her feet, those glorious, ridiculous appendages, were gone, dissolved by a fatal splash of fermented Nothing.

  "That's not fair," said Jennifer T.

  She rose from Taffy's side, and took off running.

  "Jennifer T.!" called Mr. Feld. "Come back!"

  She flew, as swiftly as her strong legs could carry her, out of the Winterlands, across the third base line of Diamond Green, and straight up to the great oak gate that marked the distance to straightaway center. She threw herself against the gate. She pounded on it with her fists. When that had no visible result, she kicked it, fiercely but without producing a sound louder than the tapping of a fly at a windowpane. She turned around and kicked it again, like a mule this time, with the bottom of her foot. By the time Ethan reached her, she had given up her assault on the gate of heaven, and lay crumpled on the grass at its foot.

  "I guess they're kind of busy in there right now," Ethan said. "Dealing with Coyote and all."

  "It's not fair," she said. "What about Taffy? What about me?"

  For her scars were intact; her finger, where she had once broken it, was still a little bit crooked. And inside of her she was still just Jennifer T. Rideout, of the ne'er-do-well Rideouts of Clam Island, a shadowtail, a mongrel, a mutt.

  Ethan sank down into the grass beside her.

  "I like you how you are," he told her, squeezing her rough hand. "I'm glad you aren't any different."

  "Yeah, yeah, Feld," she said, tugging her hand away and scrambling to her feet. She jerked her ponytail more firmly through the opening at the back of her cap. But she smiled, and he saw there was a flush of color in her cheeks. "Blah blah blah."

  THEY MADE A RUDE STRETCHER OUT OF THE DEBRIS OF THE SLEDGE-wagon, and dragged Taffy across Diamond Green into the warmth of Applelawn, the resting place of so many wounded heroes. Here, as all over the Far Territories of the Summerlands, a cool blue rain of light had fallen, extinguishing the raging fires, and repairing the tens of thousand of acres that had al
ready burned. The apple trees were bursting with new blossoms, and the Beaver Women were hard at work rebuilding the Lodges of the Blessed. They spent two days enjoying the legendary hospitality of those Lodges, and caring for Taffy's wounds. And they prepared for their long trip back. Following the detailed instructions set forth in the chapter of The Wa-He-Ta Brave's Official Tribe Handbook devoted to earning the Watercraft Feather, they fashioned a sturdy and capacious raft, and Grim the Giant cut and peeled some long sturdy poles. Then they set off across the Big River. This time they passed unmolested, without so much the ripple of a whisker-tip to disturb the smooth flow of the waters.

  When they arrived at Old Cat Landing, they received a warm reception from a crew of Big Liars who were now, in the wake of the flood, considerably bigger than before, though still not anywhere near their former grandeur. Nevertheless the Liars had outgrown their former haunts and homes. They had been obliged to level the entire settlement, and to rebuild it ten times as big. The Tall Man with the Axe had grown so tall—taller even than Mooseknuckle John—that it was no trouble at all for him to wade out into the river and dredge up poor old Skidbladnir, slimed over and drizzling brown sludge, from the bottom of the river. In spite of her sorry condition, the Felds were delighted to see her again. Mr. Feld and Grim the Giant took her apart, piece by piece, carefully cleaning and drying each valve, coupling and hose, and then put her back together again (albeit with the functions of clutch and brake pedals reversed). A store of prunejack was fetched down from certain persons in a particular range of mountains, and after a week of Miss Annie Christmas's enormous hospitality they set out once again for Big Kobold, aiming to take it this time from the other side.

  Grim had built a kind of open trailer out of an old piano crate and a couple of wagon wheels, and it was in this homemade ambulance that they stashed the twelve Boar Tooth ferishers, and laid Taffy the Sasquatch. She had not regained consciousness since the day they found her lying maimed in the icefields of the Winterlands, and as they journeyed up into the Raucous Mountains and down the other side she emitted only the occasional moan and, from time to time, a dour sorrowing snatch of some ancient Sasquatch lament. Spider-Rose, who with the help of the ferisher women brewed a nourishing formula for her little brother out of leaves and bee-nectars they found in the woods, took to nursing the Sasquatch with the same rich decoction, forcing the clear green liquid into Taffy's mouth through a bit of hose left over from Grim's reconstruction of the car.