Authors: Michael Chabon
Summerland (25 page)
"What are you trying to do?" she said.
"Twist my shoulders," said Jennifer T. She was pressing down, as hard as she could, on the three pins, using her ankles, her knees, and the muscles of her upper arms. The resistance of the springs was stiff and the tips of the rods jabbed her skin.
"What?" Freedom, when at last it comes, rarely resembles the picture the prisoner has longingly painted of it. Taffy's great bearded jaw hung slack, and she blinked.
"I'm being a
key
, Bigfoot! Grab my shoulders and turn me!"
Taffy stood up and shook off two hundred years of servitude. She had watched often enough as Mooseknuckle John operated the lock with the enormous iron key. She knew that Jennifer T. must be twisted—clockwise, from Taffy's point of view—in order to lift the latch of the cage. She took hold of the girl by the shoulders, and twisted.
"Owww!"
Taffy let go of her at once.
"No, it's okay!" Jennifer T. said. "Just do it. Hurry!"
The big furry hands, long-thumbed and steady, grasped the girl's shoulders again and cranked her in a clockwise direction. Jennifer T. pressed with all her might against the pins, until she felt that they were about to pierce her skin. Slowly, almost irritably, the key shaft began to groan and give; the latch lifted and, with a rusty creaking like the wheels of a train, the heavy iron door swung open. Jennifer T., of course, swung with it. Her head was now pointed toward the center of the great hall—she herself lay on her back, face up, and she missed the moment when the Sasquatch stepped out of her cage a free beast.
A great rumble shook the lodge, and the walls rang like a carillon. Shards and chunks of rock fell and shattered against the hard ground that underlay the furs.
"He's coming!" Jennifer T. said. "Get me out of here."
Taffy swung the door shut again and this time gripped Jennifer T. by the feet. Now that she was on the other side, she needed to turn the girl clockwise once more. The key shaft gave more easily in this direction, and Taffy soon was able to set the latch and tug the girl free. She set the girl on her feet and then surprised her by catching her up into her soft, hard, furry arms and squeezing every atom of oxygen from Jennifer T.'s lungs. Taffy had a smell that was rank but not unpleasant, the way Gran Billy Ann's dogs smelled after they had gone swimming in the Sound.
"Thank you!" Taffy cried. "Oh, thank you, thank you!"
A sparkling dark wave crested and broke at the center of Jennifer T.'s brain. It was funny, considering that you spent every second of your entire life doing it, that you could forget how important breathing actually was. "Please…put…me…"
SHE WOKE UP IN BACKSEAT OF THE FELDS' SAAB WAGON, JOSTLING
and pitching and tossing. There was a sound all around her like pennies being shaken from a bank as the contents of the car rattled and tumbled. Her head struck something hard that turned out to be the head of Thor Wignutt.
"Ensign Rideout has regained consciousness, Captain," Thor Wignutt said.
Ethan turned around to look at her. He was sitting in the driver's seat, with Cinquefoil riding shotgun. The ferisher was sitting very still, with his eyes closed.
"Hey, Jennifer T.," Ethan said. "Hold on tight. John's about to lob us across."
Sure enough, the windows of the car were filled, on the right side, with a view of nothing but the great pale fingers of Mooseknuckle John; on the left side curved his enormous thumb with its long black nail. He was holding Skidbladnir by her underside, pinched between his fingers, like a boy about to launch a paper plane.
"Where's—" She sat up, panicked.
"Shh," Ethan said. He pointed toward the back of the car. Jennifer T. turned around and saw a smudge of black fur at the top of the rear window of the car's hatch. It looked very much like a foot. Now she noticed another bit of fur visible at the top of her window, and one at Thor's that matched. Ethan pointed to Cinquefoil, whose forehead was beaded once more with glinting drops of pale golden sweat. All at once she understood: Taffy was clinging to the roof of the car, probably grasping the stay cables that held the envelope in place. And Cinquefoil—pale, damp, all but unconscious himself—was working desperately to maintain the grammer that was keeping Mooseknuckle John from noticing.
"READY, MORSELS?" The giant's voice rocked the car. It held a note of malicious pleasure, like the voice of a bully just before he "helps" you into the swimming pool—with all of your clothes still on.
They all gripped their thick Swedish safety belts and held on.
"SMELL SOMETHING," the giant said. "SMELL
TAFFY
!"
He snuffled and sniffed and muttered to himself for a moment. A low moan escaped the ferisher's lips. But the grammer held. As Mooseknuckle John raised his arm they were driven deep into their seats. The cables shivered and sang. Then the wind was in them, and they thrummed like the strings of an enormous guitar, and Jennifer T. was thrown backward with all the force of a giant's mighty arm. The car squeaked and shuddered, and the wind whistled over the car. Jennifer T. turned, and saw the giant disappearing rapidly behind them, rubbing absently at his belly, very sorry indeed to see his meal go sailing off into the blue.
"WELL, REUBENS," CINQUEFOIL SAID, AFTER THEY HAD BEEN
bubbling along over the endless green carpet of the Great Woods for half an hour. Their route, Cinquefoil hoped, would take them clear over the Raucous Mountains, over the Big River to Applelawn, and thence across Diamond Green to the well called Murmury. "That were yer first tangling-up with the greater grammer."
"What's that?" Ethan said.
"It's what's supposed to keep you reubens
out
of the Summerlands," Taffy said, from the roof of the car.
"Not exac'ly," Cinquefoil said. "It won't never keep ya out if yer so hot ta get in as all that. It'll let ya in, you bet. But it won't never let ya get far. Not without making sure that ya gotten yerself all tangled up in grammer."
"What happens to you then?" Ethan said, looking himself up and down as if for any lingering traces of grammer that might be clinging to his clothing.
"
Stories
happen," the ferisher said. "Misadventures. Exploits. Stumble through at a spot where the greater grammer is laid on all nice and thick, might take ya a hunnert years ta get two miles. Send a reubenish army through—just try!—and they get tangled up in all kinds of sagas and folderol. We're well past it. Fer we'd best get on our way. I fear our time may be very short."
Ethan checked his watch again and found that the numeral 1 at the bottom right corner of the calendar page was now a 2, and that the arrow beside it was pointing
up
.
"I wish I knew what this meant," he said.
"What?" said Jennifer T.
"This little thing here, with the two and the arrow. When we were in the giant's house, I looked at it and it was a one, and the arrow was pointing down."
Jennifer T. pulled his wrist toward her.
"Innings," she said. "Top of the second."
"Top of the second inning?" Ethan said. "The second inning of
what
?"
But even before the question was out of his mouth, he already knew the answer. He could hear Mo Rideout's gravel-bottomed voice echoing in his memory: "
Ragged Rock is a day, the last day. The last day of the last year. The last out in the bottom of the ninth
."
"Top of the second," he said. "Seven and a half innings left to go."
Just then the guy wires from which they dangled began to thrum, in unison, deep and low. Dark clouds were piling up in the sky all around them, out of the proverbial clear blue sky.
"Mmmmm," said Taffy the Sasquatch, inhaling deeply the free air of the Summerlands for the tenth time since leaving the giant behind. "Storm coming."
"Does this mean that
nothing
is going to happen to us?" Ethan said. "No stories, I mean? Because I kind of think we actually need something to happen, or we'll never find my dad. Finding my dad, and saving the Tree—it's like a story, only it's
true
.''
"All stories are true," Cinquefoil said.
"You sound like old Albert," said Jennifer T. "Anyway, Eth, I wouldn't worry too much about nothing happening."
She pointed, and the wind rose to a whuffling gust that made the silvery envelope shudder and hum nervously to itself, and then they were drowned in the shadow of an enormous pair of wings.
FINER MINDS THAN MY OWN
have forever dulled their edges trying to explain the workings of clocks and calendars among the worlds. A human traveler to the Winterlands may pass a single month—the month of Splike, say, with its forty-three days of stabbing black hail—amid the horrors of the Blue Toeholds, only to find on his return to the Middling that even his great-grandchildren have been dead for fifty years or more. Another may spend her entire life adventuring in the Summerlands and then return, aged and bent, to find, still waiting for her, the supper and husband and children that she left only a few minutes before. So I can't really explain how it happened, but nevertheless it is true that
at the very moment
when Skidbladnir appeared in the skies over the Far Territories of the Summerlands, a motley caravan was approaching the crossroads known as Betty's Bonepit, in the shadowless region of the Winterlands known as the Iceburns.
When Ethan tried, much later, to reconstruct the course of his father's strange and painful journey across the Winterlands in the clutches of Coyote, he came to the conclusion that there were at least six, and possibly thirty-seven, more direct routes the Rade might have taken from Clam Island to the heart of giantland. There was no reason for Coyote's party even to
be
in the Iceburns—it was totally out of their way. But the Rade rarely travels in a straight line, or takes the most direct route to any destination. In fact, if you consult the old myths and legends, you will see that it has always been extremely rare for Coyote actually to have a destination in mind when he moves among the worlds. Coyote, as the tales tell us—he just sort of goes along. His traveling companions, the vast, shrieking, tumbling, lying, skulking, dancing, shambling crimson-and-black-clad Rade of skrikers, graylings, hobs, goblins, lubbers, fire sprites, and beastmen of every imaginable breed and configuration, including weretrout and wereflies, known as the Rade, almost never knew where they would be sleeping the day after tomorrow.
They did not even always know for sure, as Robin Padfoot tried to explain to Mr. Bruce Feld, if Coyote was even among them as they rambled along. Which was why there was just no way he could take Mr. Feld to see Coyote, or convey Mr. Feld's repeated demand to be released immediately.
