Werewolves in Their Youth (22 page)

“I know,” said Grace. “You said you play country music.”

“Most of the time.”

“Well, I don’t really like country music.”

Olivier cocked his head and stared at her, his forehead crumpled in mock perplexity at her chilly tone. He was smarter than he looked—a condition as rare on Chubb Island as it is anywhere else. Mike Veal handed him the beer he had ordered and Olivier drank down half of it in a swallow.

“I’m not bothering you,” he said. “I should go?”

She shook her head.

“How’s the car?” he said, after a moment.

He saw that her gaze was focused on Brenda Petersen and the dark little jerking man she was dancing with. “Who is that guy?”

“That’s my husband,” she said. “His name is Jake.”

“Your husband?” For a moment he looked puzzled. “That’s cool,” he said, with the eye-crinkle on again.

“We’re getting a divorce.”

“Oh.”

“We haven’t had sex with each other in three and a half years,” she went on, with a sudden sweep of her arm. “We stopped living together back in January. We haven’t had sex with anyone else, either.”

“Huh.”

“No sex. At all.”

Her husband had stopped dancing. He was standing in the middle of the dance floor, just standing there, watching Grace, looking as if—over the stomping of bootheels, over the labored whooping of off-duty sheriff’s deputy Royce T. Sturgeon, over the dog-kennel laughter of a Friday night in the Patch, over the sounds of the islanders all around him as they shook their hair, their long key chains, the fringes on their vests—he had heard or could guess every word that Grace had just said.

Grace saw Brenda Petersen pulling on his arm, asking him if everything was all right. “I have no idea why I just told you that,” Grace said to Olivier. “I know I shouldn’t be saying it at all.” She turned and took hold of both his hands in hers. “I want you to forget what I said.”

“Three and a half years,” said Olivier. ”Shit.”

“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” she said. She stood up, or rather toppled in a more or less controlled manner off the stool, landing somehow on both feet. She still had not let go of his hands. “Come on.”

“Tell you what,” said Olivier. “My buddy John just came in the door, over there. I have to get with him for just a minute and then I’ll take you up on that, all right?”

Grace watched him go.

She looked over at Jake again and saw that he was watching Olivier, too. He was rocking a little on the soles of his feet, and a weird, broken smile emerged. When Olivier came within a few feet of him, Jake held out his hand vaguely.

Over the ten years since his arrival on Chubb Island, Olivier Berquet had been involved in seventeen minor altercations in taverns, and four out-and-out brawls, in which teeth were scattered to the night air and men went to the urgent-care center to have bits of parking-lot gravel tweezed from their palms and cheeks. His name had appeared twice in the police log of the local weekly, the
Clam,
and when he was convicted of battery there had been an item on page 1. It took less provocation than a drunken, jealous, hard-up man out on a despairing date with his estranged wife to get Olivier swinging, as everyone in the room well knew.

On the jukebox, Jim Morrison shouted the last words of “Break On Through” and the song cut off. People stopped dancing. The cue ball slammed into the nine.

“Is there a problem?” Olivier said, calmly, rubbing his chin.

Jake reached out for Olivier’s right hand, and grasped it.

“I just wanted to wish you all the luck in the world,” he said.

There was no great sarcasm in Jake’s tone, and in its absence Olivier seemed a little confused. He nodded warily, letting Jake work his hand up and down, the way he might have shaken with a man in an airport holding a Bible and a stack of brochures.

“Yeah,” said Olivier. “Whatever, dude.”

As the next song, “Born on the Bayou,” came on, he pulled his hand from Jake’s and jived his way heavily across the Patch and over to John Bekkedahl, a fat, bearded man wearing a Sturgis T-shirt. “Fuckin’ yuppies,” he muttered. Somebody laughed.

Grace went to Jake, who was standing by himself, still holding his hand out.

“What happened to Brenda?” she said.

“I don’t know,” said Jake. “She thinks we’re screwed up.”

“We are.”

“What’s the story with Olivier?”

“I think I scared him off with my evident madness.”

“Do you want to dance?”

“No,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

“Meaning what?” said Jake.

Not quite sure of the answer, they didn’t leave. They stayed past last call, keeping each other company at the bar, while the Patch, one by one or in twos and threes, exhaled its customers. Olivier went home with Carla Lacy, whose husband was on a boat in the Bering Sea, working fourteen-hour shifts feeding tuna carcasses to a rendering vat. Brenda Petersen left with a tall, good-looking kid named Al or Alf from Tacoma.

At last, Mike Veal threw on the overhead lights, driving the remaining patrons from the inky crevices of obscurity and glamour into which they had tucked themselves. For them it was like coming to in an emergency room, and they went out, sour and incoherently sad. A few diehards headed down the road to Peavey’s, where the bar clock was known to be kept only seven minutes ahead of Pacific Standard. Still Jake and Grace remained on their stools, waiting out the ten-dollar bill that Jake had fed the jukebox. Mike Veal went around snuffing the neon signs, stacking chairs, and upending the other barstools. When he pulled the plug on the jukebox, they took the hint and settled their tab. Jake waited while Grace went to the toilet, and then they made cautious progress down the back hall and out into the chilly night.

As they came through the back door Jake stumbled over Lester Foley, who was sleeping under a pile of blankets beside the Dumpster. Grace stopped.

“Grace,” Jake murmured.

“Sh-h-h.” She knelt down beside Lester, and then, gently so as not to wake him, peeled a lank strand of hair from his hollow cheek.

“Grace, what are you doing?” said Jake. “Come on.”

“Nothing,” she said. “Be quiet.”

She drew two more strands of hair from the oily mass under his stocking cap and wove them with the first into a stiff, skinny braid. She looked around in the gravel and mud at her feet and picked up the discarded cap from a bottle of Oly. Biting her lip, she squeezed the cap between her fingers until it curved inward on itself like a jagged whelk. She threaded the tip of the braid through it, and pinched it closed. Looking at her handiwork, she rocked back and forth on her toes, the leather of her duck shoes creaking.

“He’s just sleeping it off, Grace,” Jake said. He gave a tug on her collar, and she tipped back onto her heels. “He’ll be fine.”

“He knew Dane Lichty,” Grace said.

“Not the way I do,” said Jake.

Jake’s car, a Honda station wagon, was parked at the far end of the lot. Jake started toward it, then stopped, and seemed to sag a little to one side. “Can’t do it,” he said. “I think I’ve had too much.”

“Just get in,” called Grace, running under the steadily increasing rain toward her car. “I’ll take you.”

They climbed into a raked, round-finned old Volvo P-1800 that looked gray in the halogen glow of the Patch’s security flood but was really an elegant pale yellow, somewhere between the color of a manila folder and the back sheet of a parking citation. Grace had bought the car three days before from Olivier Berquet, for six hundred dollars. A few years back, Olivier had flipped it over on Cemetery Road, racing to make the ferry, but he had not mentioned this to Grace, although everyone else knew the story. Olivier had suggested to Grace that she have someone look it over, knowing somehow that she never would.

There was a flat, dishpan rattle as Jake closed the door on his side. Grace switched on the radio but did not start the engine. The only sound that emerged from the speakers was a fly-wing hum in the left channel.

“You always wanted one of these,” said Jake.

She nodded.

“Hey,” she said. “Now I finally get to see your place.”

“It’s small,” said Jake.

“Is it too small?”

“I’m all right,” he said. He rested his left hand on the knob of the gearshift. After a minute she laid hers on top of his.

“Nobody knows,” she said.

“Nobody knows what?”

“Nobody knows the trouble we’ve seen.”

“It’s nice that we can share that,” said Jake.

The rain dripped from the fir trees that overspread the Patch’s back lot, and seeped slowly in through the windshield frame on Jake’s side. The remaining unbroken panes in the greenhouse of the old strawberry plant, a gaunt ruin on the other side of the parking lot, chimed with rain.

“Well,” Grace said. “I guess neither of us got lucky.”

She twisted the key in the ignition, and turned out of the Patch’s lot, onto the island highway. The last ferry of the night, of course, had pulled in at the Eastpoint dock eighteen minutes earlier. The cars in the opposite lane were strung like Christmas lights for a mile, coming out of Berthannette, and it must have been hard for Grace and Jake to be in her car as it filled up with the flash of other people’s headlights, then went dark again, and to know that everyone who passed them was headed for home.

The first real writer I ever knew was a man who did all of his work under the name of August Van Zorn. He lived at the McClelland Hotel, which my grandmother owned, in the uppermost room of its turret, and taught English literature at Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two. His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a stoop-shouldered wooden suit rack that once belonged to my father. Mr. Vetch’s wife had been living in a sanatorium up near Erie since the deaths of their teenaged sons in a backyard explosion some years earlier, and it was always my impression that he wrote, in part, to earn the money to keep her there. He wrote horror stories, hundreds of them, many of which were eventually published in such periodicals of the day as
Weird Tales, Strange Stories, Black Tower,
and the like… . He worked at night, using a fountain pen, in a bentwood rocking chair, with a Hudson Bay blanket draped across his lap and a bottle of bourbon on the table before him. When his work was going well, he could be heard in every corner of the sleeping hotel, rocking and madly rocking while he subjected his heroes to the gruesome rewards of their passions for unnameable things.

—
GRADY TRIPP
,
Wonder Boys

I
N THE FALL OF
1948, when I arrived in Plunkettsburg to begin the fieldwork I hoped would lead to a doctorate in archaeology, there were still a good number of townspeople living there whose memories stretched back to the time, in the final decade of the previous century, when the soot-blackened hills that encircle the town fairly swarmed with savants and mad diggers. In 1892 the discovery, on a hilltop overlooking the Miskahannock River, of the burial complex of a hitherto-unknown tribe of Mound Builders had set off a frenzy of excavation and scholarly poking around that made several careers, among them that of the aged hero of my profession who was chairman of my dissertation committee. It was under his redoubtable influence that I had taken up the study of the awful, illustrious Miskahannocks, with their tombs and bone pits, a course that led me at last, one gray November afternoon, to turn my overladen fourthhand Nash off the highway from Pittsburgh to Morgantown, and to navigate, tightly gripping the wheel, the pitted ghost of a roadbed that winds up through the Yuggogheny Hills, then down into the broad and gloomy valley of the Miskahannock.

As I negotiated that endless series of hairpin and blind curves, I was afforded an equally endless series of dispiriting partial views of the place where I would spend the next ten months of my life. Like many of its neighbors in that iron-veined country, Plunkettsburg was at first glance unprepossessing—a low, rusting little city, with tarnished onion domes and huddled houses, drab as an armful of dead leaves strewn along the ground. But as I left the last hill behind me and got my first unobstructed look, I immediately noted the one structure that, while it did nothing to elevate my opinion of my new home, altered the humdrum aspect of Plunkettsburg sufficiently to make it remarkable, and also sinister. It stood off to the east of town, in a zone of weeds and rust-colored earth, a vast, black box, bristling with spiky chimneys, extending over some five acres or more, dwarfing everything around it. This was, I knew at once, the famous Plunkettsburg Mill. Evening was coming on, and in the half-light its windows winked and flickered with inner fire, and its towering stacks vomited smoke into the autumn twilight. I shuddered, and then cried out. So intent had I been on the ghastly black apparition of the mill that I had nearly run my car off the road.

“ ‘Here in this mighty fortress of industry,’ ” I quoted aloud in the tone of a newsreel narrator, reassuring myself with the ironic reverberation of my voice, “ ‘turn the great cogs and thrust the relentless pistons that forge the pins and trusses of the American dream.’ ” I was recalling the words of a chamber of commerce brochure I had received last week from my hosts, the antiquities department of Plunkettsburg College, along with particulars of my lodging and library privileges. They were anxious to have me; it had been many years since the publication of my chairman’s
Miskahannock Surveys
had effectively settled all answerable questions—save, I hoped, one—about the vanished tribe and consigned Plunkettsburg once again to the mists of academic oblivion and the thick black effluvia of its satanic mill.

“So what is there left to say about that pointy-toothed crowd?” said Carlotta Brown-Jenkin, draining her glass of brandy. The chancellor of Plunkettsburg College and chairwoman of the antiquities department had offered to stand me to dinner on my first night in town. We were sitting in the Hawaiian-style dining room of a Chinese restaurant downtown. Brown-Jenkin was herself appropriately antique, a gaunt old girl in her late seventies, her nearly hairless scalp worn and yellowed, the glint of her eyes, deep within their cavernous sockets, like that of ancient coins discovered by torchlight. “I quite thought that your distinguished mentor had revealed all their bloody mysteries.”