Summerland

by Michael Chabon

  The welcome they received at Dandelion Hill was much warmer than the first; and they spent a few days here, resting and watching the tiny cheeks and serious gaze of Nubakaduba, whom everyone called Newboy, melt the frozen heart of Queen Filaree—the healing effects of the flood being, in some cases, a little delayed.

  When it was time to leave Dandelion Hill they lost Dick Pettipaw, as well. He was happy to return to the warrens and tunnels and secret ways of the great hill, but sad, too, for no longer would he contest the ratting ingenuity of Grimalkin John. The little giant had decided to carry on with the remnants of Big Chief Cinquefoil's Traveling Shadowtails All-Star Baseball Club as far as his homelands. Though the flood had burned away the thirst for revenge against the brothers who had bound him into slavery, there was still a score to settle.

  "I'll be wantin' them to look me in the eye and beg me to forgive them," he said. "Even if they has to scramble down on their bellies to do it." He grinned. "Especially then."

  "I'll miss your great ham-heeled lumbering footsteps," the wererat said, blowing his nose in a lace handkerchief. "Warning me from a mile off that you were coming."

  "And I'll miss your blowhard prattle," Grim the Giant said. "And your mule-headedness, to boot."

  So, in the shadow of Dandelion Hill, they parted, the best of enemies.

  Skid drove on, taking it slow to conserve juice, headed for a point on a branch several days to the east of Dandelion Hill that Thor had decided, after making a complicated study of his map, lay within leap of a spot in the Winterlands called Gnashville, which in turn lay a leap away from Bellingham, Washington, where they could catch a ferry home. When they were two days out from Dandelion Hill, Grimalkin John began to smell something familiar in the air—"the good old rotten stink of giant." After another half a day, he asked Mr. Feld to stop the car and let him out. This was a calculated risk on his part, as they all knew. Cinquefoil felt that it was likely the Unsealing had washed away the binding grammer on the little giant's hide, but there was no way to know for sure until Grim had put a day's march between himself and Ethan Feld. So, having stuffed his pockets with what remained of the shavings he'd taken from Ethan's bat, he shook hands with his friends and with each of the ferishers in turn. Then Grim the Giant climbed out of the car, slung his knapsack over his shoulder, and, with a backward look and a wave of his hand, walked off into the Summerlands and out of this story.

  Three days and two crossings later, they found themselves at the Bellingham ferry dock.

  "Well," said Rodrigo Buendía. "This it, little dudes."

  "Yeah," Ethan said.

  Rodrigo sighed. He was at sixes and sevens. He had decided to rent a car in downtown Bellingham, but that was the extent of his plans. The Angels had been set to leave for a twelve-day road trip the day Ethan and Jennifer had snatched him away, and he was certain that his unexplained, unexcused absence meant that his contract with the team had been terminated. He walked over to the newspaper vending machines and bought a Seattle Times, to see if it said anything about the mysterious absence of the Angels' faded slugger. But there was nothing, aside from the information that the Angels were off today, traveling to Seattle. Then his mouth opened, and his eyes got almost comically wide.

  "Whoa!" he said. He pointed to the date on the newspaper, and then all their eyes widened. Though they had spent nearly two months in the Summerlands, in the Middling it was, according to the Times, only two days after they had left Clam Island; and, at the same time, a week before they had spirited Rodrigo Buendía out of Rancho Encantado. Don't try to figure it all out; just take my word for it.

  "Do you know what that mean?" he asked them. "I remember this day. It was an off day. Yes! We had a game in Seattle…yes…and I—I—forgot my wife's birthday. And she was so…that was the start of the…Oh! Oh my gosh, dudes."

  "Go," said Jennifer T.

  "I have to go! Good-bye, now! Come to see me in Anaheim, I will put you in the best seats."

  Another delayed effect of Ethan's home run, then, was the healing of the marriage of Rodrigo Buendía, who called his wife from a Dairy Queen and asked her to meet him at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle, in the honeymoon suite. As you know, he subsequently went on to a .299 season, with 32 home runs and 98 RBIs, and was voted Comeback Player of the Year by the Sportswriters Union.

  They waited for the last ferry of the night, which was likely to be the least crowded. Mr. Feld had bought a tarp at a hardware store, and they threw this over the trailer to cover their hairy, moaning cargo. The ferishers, of course, would be invisible to anyone who did not believe in ferishers. Now, Bellingham, Washington, is a freethinking town, and it was not a completely safe bet that there was nobody who held such beliefs. This was why they waited for the 1:14 A.M. to Clam Island.

  As it turned out, old Albert Rideout was returning to Clam Island that night, as well, from one of his aimless Coyote rambles along the borders of Canada and the United States. He spent the passage from the mainland in the ferry's snack bar, drinking whisky from a can of 7-Up. He was in a uniquely sour mood. He was never exactly satisfied or happy when he came crawling home, trailing arrests and accidents. But this time it was worse than usual. About ten days earlier, ten days into his latest bender, he had happened to cross paths with a full-length mirror. This was, unbeknownst to him of course, at the very moment when the ebbing tide of the Unsealing came foaming over the particular town in the Idaho panhandle where he found himself. It was a clear, cold, truthful look at himself that he got at that moment—at the ruin he had made of his life and, in particular, of his failure as a father. Though the moment had passed, the memory of it had been bothering him ever since.

  When he felt the series of iron shudders, deep in the belly of the boat, that meant they were slowing for the approach to Southend Dock, he belched, tossed the can into the trash, and then stumbled downstairs to the car deck. The wind was from the west, carrying with it all the familiar smells of the island of his birth and early promise: Douglas fir, tidal flats, and a faint ghost of the old strawberry patches. He saw the lights of the rapidly approaching ferry dock. He had better get into his old junkheap, then.

  He turned, looking for the 1976 AMC Matador that had recently come into his possession. It was not where he had left it. He did not, in fact, remember where he had left it. Suddenly he was not sure if he had even boarded in his car, or if a lady named Shermanette had not dropped him off at the Bellingham dock. He set out among the few late cars, imagining that the island people in them were staring at him with the usual disapproval, imagining that he did not care. It was then that he heard what sounded to him like someone hawking up a really big loogey. He turned around. There, chained to an old orange Saab that he vaguely recognized, was a funky-looking wooden trailer, covered in a brand-new tarp. As he stared, wondering if the sound could possibly have come from the trailer, he saw the tarp twitch. Something was there, thrashing and moaning. Albert's heart began to beat faster—he had a feeling that something very wrong was about to appear from beneath the tarp. And then a moment later he found himself staring into the bleary, baffled face of what he took at first for a man in a gorilla suit, until he saw the long pink tongue emerge from the thing's mouth, hawking and smacking its lips as if to rid itself of a nasty taste in its mouth. Then the tarp shifted abruptly, and Albert saw how huge the thing was, and just as his clouded mind began to assemble all the necessary components of the idea Bigfoot—that was when he saw that the huge, hideous thing had no feet at all!

  When the last car drove off the ferry, a ferry worker named Big Dave Cardoon, who had graduated from high school with Albert, found him lying there, passed out drunk in the middle of the empty deck. He dragged his old classmate to his feet, and then when it developed that Albert had no ride home, stuffed Albert into his truck, and drove him back to the Rideout place. It struck him as amusing at first that Albert kept muttering "Bigfoot spat on me," over and over again, but it quickly grew annoying, and he was glad to get the p
oor fellow out of his car and up the sagging steps of the house.

  THEY HAD JUST ROLLED OFF THE FERRY WHEN ONE OF THE ferishers climbed from the trailer onto the roof of the car, and peeked in through the window to say that Taffy had revived, and seemed to be in pain. Ethan heard her heavy moaning, then, and saw from the way one of the dockworkers was staring at the car that other people could hear it, too.

  "We better get her to a doctor," Mr. Feld said. "I'll turn the car around. We'll take her to St. Joseph's in Bellingham. God knows how we'll explain—"

  "Dad," Ethan said. "Would Mom have known how to take care of her?"

  "Your mother? Treat a Sasquatch?" He had slowed the car, preparing to turn it around for the long ride back to the hospital on the mainland. Now he stopped. He frowned. "You know something, Ethan? I sort of think she would have. Is there a vet on the island? There must be."

  "There is," Jennifer T. said. "Her name is Margaret something. Down by the tree nursery. We took one of the dogs there when one of the other dogs bit its ear off."

  "Sounds perfect," said Mr. Feld. And he turned the car around.

  DR. MARGARET PEDERSEN LIVED IN A SMALL, NEAT HOUSE OF brick and siding, behind the sign that bore her name. The house was dark, at this hour, except for the porch light. As they pulled into her gravel drive, what sounded like a hundred dogs all began yapping and howling at once. Lights came on inside. The aluminum screen door banged open. A large woman in a long housecoat stepped onto the porch and peered into the shadows.

  "Yes?" she called, sounding sympathetic and annoyed at the same time, and maybe a little bit afraid. "Who is it?"

  "Dr. Pedersen?" Mr. Feld said, as he climbed out of the car. "It's Bruce Feld. I live out at the old Okawa place."

  "Yes?" This time it sounded a little more purely annoyed.

  "We have a—a hurt—"

  "Creature," Thor suggested.

  Dr. Pedersen belted her housecoat more tightly around herself and then came across the lawn. Ethan saw the ferishers quickly tumble out the front end of the trailer and go scurrying into nearby woods, with Cinquefoil close behind, as if they could sense that Dr. Pedersen believed in fairies, and had decided it would be better not to distract her.

  "Well?" said Dr. Pedersen. She looked, a little impatiently, from Mr. Feld to the three children he had apparently decided to drag out into the middle of the night. Then she looked at the tarp-covered trailer. She was a very tall, large-framed woman with a pinched mouth and wide, pale eyes. She wore her hair in a crew cut. It was the haircut, and that warm, exasperated voice, that made you want to trust her to heal a broken Sasquatch. Mr. Feld hesitated a moment longer, then pulled back the tarp in a single jerk. Taffy sat up, gasping, as if wakened suddenly from a startling dream. She and Dr. Pedersen stared at each other for a moment.

  Dr. Peggy Pedersen, as they would later learn, had been awakened in the middle of the night many times in the past. As the only veterinarian on Clam Island, with her office in a trailer behind her house, she was accustomed to having people, often hysterically upset, show up at three in the morning because driving home from the bars of Clam Center they had struck or run over some dog. It was not even unheard of—after the Urgent Care Center was forced to eliminate twenty-four-hour care—for late-night visitors to show up with humans needing some kind of emergency help. But this was definitely her first Sasquatch. She closed her eyes, and opened them again, then glanced helplessly at Mr. Feld, with an expression on her face that seemed to invite him to tell her the whole thing was a joke. Mr. Feld nodded, very solemn. Then Dr. Pedersen looked down, and saw the ragged stumps of Taffy's legs, and all trace of doubt and late-night bafflement vanished from her face.

  "Oh, poor thing," she said.

  THE DAY AFTER THEIR RETURN WAS A PRACTICE DAY, AND WHEN Ethan, Thor, and Jennifer T. showed up at Jock MacDougal they had missed only one game, another loss, 8–2 to the Bigfoot Tavern Bigfoots.

  "Well," said Mr. Perry Olafssen, as they came across the parking lot toward the ball field. He put on his stern face, which was really just a variation of his disappointed face. "Well, well. Missed a game, you three. And we needed you." He said this last part to Jennifer T. "Can't do that, kids. Can't just not show up for a game. Not without calling first. Would never fly in the bigs. If you were paid, I'd have to dock you." He looked at Mr. Feld. "Not good, Bruce."

  Though nothing was more important to Mr. Feld, as we know, than showing up for a game, he was too tired even to blush. For the last two nights he had worked feverishly to mold a pair of enormous prosthetic feet for Taffy out of his remarkable picofiber polymer, hoping to arrive at something that would be light andflexibleand yet stand up to all the punishment that a Sasquatch's life inflicted on her feet. When he was not working on the feet, he was visiting Taffy over at Dr. Pedersen's, in the doctor's back bedroom. He was also, Ethan had begun to suspect, visiting Dr. Pedersen, who turned out to be a lifelong Phillies fan.

  "Sorry, Perry," Mr. Feld said. "Won't happen again." And indeed it did not.

  When that day's practice was over, Mr. Olafssen, who had been watching Ethan through narrowed eyes, called him over.

  "Funny bat," he said. "Where'd you get it?"

  Ethan handed Splinter to Mr. Olafssen. He had known this moment would eventually come.

  "Made it," he said, neatly leaving out the pronoun. He did not want to lie—what if people started asking him to make bats for them?—but he did not care to get into the whole Grim-the-Giant thing with his coach, either.

  "You missed a spot." Mr. Olafssen pointed to the Knot. "Must chafe a bit."

  Ethan held out the palm of his hand. The blister had long since hardened into a thick yellowish callus. He shrugged.

  "I'm used to it," he said.

  After practice, the children cut through the woods to see what had become of Hotel Beach. The bulldozers were gone, the earthmovers and backhoes, all the warning signs that had been thrown up by the minions of TransForm Properties. But that was not all. The birch trees had grown back, to very nearly their former stature, or else they had simply been replaced, in the flood of healing. Standing there, now, looking out at the silent white trees, Ethan could feel the Summerlands, nearer than ever before. He felt that he could have leapt there himself, without any help from Cutbelly or Thor.

  "I wonder how they're doing?" he said, and the others knew whom he meant right away.

  "It takes a hundred years to build a ferisher knoll," Thor said. "They're going to be living in tents for a long, long time."

  They saw less and less of Thor after that day; he began to spend more of his time leaping from this World to the Summerlands, scampering here and there across the World of his birth, traveling often in the company of Taffy the Sasquatch. Everywhere he went he inquired after a reuben baby who had been taken by a mob of ferishers outside of Cle Ellum, Washington, eleven Middling years before. The last time Ethan saw him, he had shrunk down until he was only a few inches taller than Cinquefoil, and invisible to 98.3 percent of the general population. But that was a while ago, and who knows where in the Worlds he and Taffy may have ventured, searching for the changeling whose place Thor had taken, looking for a homewood of their own.

  Even without Thor, the Roosters posted what was always afterward recalled as one of the most amazing comeback seasons in the history of Clam Island baseball. One lover of baseball cannot get a team out of the cellar, but two can turn a season around. Shortly after the return of Rideout and Feld, the Roosters started to win games. They had always placed great stock in Jennifer T., but now they very quickly, if somewhat to their surprise, learned to trust their catcher, too. Once they managed this, it was a very short step to trusting each other. They noticed that there was more to baseball than hitting the ball as hard as you could, than waving your glove in the general direction of the ball and hoping for the best. They took pitches, turned double plays, and hit the cutoff man, and instead of trying to cream it every time they got up, they just did their best to advance the
runner. They played like ferishers, with careful abandon. Finally, they started to believe. They won their last twelve games in a row, and finished tied with the Shopway Angels for first place in the Mustang League.

  A one-game playoff for the championship ensued. They had seen less of the Angels over the second half of the season than of the Reds and Bigfoots, and it took the Angels a while to realize that the boy behind home plate with a mask over his face and armored pads on his shins, knees, and chest was their old pal, Dog Boy.

  The realization finally hit when Ethan, mask thrown off, mouth open in a hopeful O, killed an Angel rally by snagging a tricky pop fly at the backstop.

  "Nice catch," said the hitter, Tommy Bluefield, who was also the Angels catcher.

  "That's nothing," Ethan said. "Josh Gibson, the Negro Leagues star who was perhaps the finest catcher ever to play this great game of baseball, once got his pie plate around a ball dropped from the top of the Washington Monument."

  Tommy Bluefield scratched his head.

  "What happened to him?" he asked Jennifer T., as she came in from the mound.

  "He read Peavine's book," she said. "Maybe you should, too."

  "Tell him about it, J.T.," said Albert Rideout, holding out his hand for a high five. He was a regular attendee of Roosters games now, as well as of dinners at the Rideout table, and he had gone to work doing odd jobs for Ethan's father. The change in him, abrupt and apparently genuine, was universally remarked. Nobody knew the reason for it, though some whispered darkly, around the Clam Island Tavern, that he had gotten some kind of a bad scare, from some Hell's Angels up in Blaine, or from some gangsters down in Tacoma, or from some neo-Nazis out by Flathead Lake.