Authors: Michael Chabon
Summerland (8 page)
The last three struggled out under the shared burden of the largest clam that Ethan had ever seen. It was easily as big as a large watermelon, and looked even bigger in the ferishers' small arms as they staggered up onto the beach with it. Its shell was lumpy and rugged as broken concrete. The rippled lip dripped with green water and some kind of brown slime. The ferishers set it down on the beach and then the rest of the mob circled around it. Ringfinger Brown gave Ethan a gentle push at the small of his back.
"Go on, boy," he said. "Listen to what Johnny Speakwater gots to say."
Ethan stepped forward—he could almost have stepped right over the ferishers, but he felt instinctively that this would be rude. He arrived at the innermost edge of the circle just as the ferisher chief was going down on one knee in front of the clam.
"Hey, Johnny," Cinquefoil said in a low, soft voice, calling to the clam like a man trying to wake a friend on the morning of some long-awaited exploit—a fishing trip or camp-out. "Whoa, Johnny Speakwater. All right now. Open up. We need a word with ya."
There was a deep rumble from inside the clam, and Ethan's heart began to beat faster as he saw the briny lips of the shell part. Water came pouring out and vanished into the sand under the clam. Little by little, with an audible creak, the upper half of the clamshell lifted an inch or so off of the lower half. As it opened Ethan could see the grayish-pink glistening muscle of the thing, wet and slurping around in its pale lower jaw.
"Burdleburbleslurpleslurpleburbleburdleslurp," said the clam, more or less.
Cinquefoil nodded, and pointed to a pair of ferishers standing nearby. One of them reached into a leather tube, a kind of quiver that hung at his back, and pulled out a rolled sheet of what looked like parchment. The other took hold of one end, and then they stepped apart from each other, unrolling the scroll. It was a sheet of pale hide, like their clothing, a rectangle of deerskin marked all around with mysterious characters of an alphabet that Ethan didn't know. It was something like a Ouija board, only the letters had been painted by hand. The ferishers knelt down in front of the clam, and held the unfurled scroll out in front of him.
Cinquefoil laid a hand on the top of the clam's shell, and stroked it softly, without seeming to notice what he was doing. He was lost in thought. Ethan supposed he was trying to come up with the right question for the oracle. Oracles were tricky, as Ethan knew from his reading of mythology. Often they answered the question you
ought
to have asked, or the one you didn't realize you were even asking. Ethan wondered what question he himself would pose to an oracular clam, given a chance.
"Johnny," the chief said finally. "Ya done warned us that Coyote was coming. And ya was right. Ya said we ought ta fetch us a champion, and we done tried. And spent up half our dear treasury in the bargain. But look at this one, Johnny." Cinquefoil made a dismissive wave in Ethan's direction. "He's just a puppy. He ain't up ta the deal. We been watching him for a while now, and we had our hopes, but Coyote's done come sooner than ever we thought. So now, Johnny, I'm asking ya one more time. What are we ta do now? How can we stop Coyote? Where can we turn?"
There was a pause, during which Johnny Speakwater emitted a series of fizzings and burps and irritable teakettle whistlings. The letter-scroll trembled in the ferishers' hands. From somewhere nearby came the disrespectful cackling of a crow. Then there was a deep
splorp
from inside Johnny Speakwater, and a jet of clear, shining water shot from between the lips of his shell. It lanced across the foot or so of air that separated the clam and the letter-scroll, and hit with a loud, thick splat against a letter that looked something like a curly U with a cross in the center of it.
"Ah!" cried all the ferishers. Cinquefoil scratched the U-and-cross into the sand.
One letter at a time, slowly, with deadly accuracy, Johnny Speakwater spat out his prophecy. As each wad of thick clam saliva hit the parchment, the letter affected was copied into the sand by Cinquefoil, and then wiped clean. The clam spat more quickly as he went along and then, when he had hawked up about forty-five blasts, he stopped. A faint, clammy sigh escaped him, and then his shell creaked shut again. Ferishers gathered around the inscription, many of them murmuring the words. Then one by one they turned to look at Ethan with renewed interest.
"What does it say?" Ethan said. "Why are you all looking at me?"
Ringfinger Brown went over to take a look at the prophecy in the sand. He rubbed at the bald place on the back of his gray head, then held out his hand to Cinquefoil. The chief handed him the stick, and the old scout scratched two fresh sentences under the strange ferisher marks.
"That about right?" he asked the chief.
Cinquefoil nodded.
"What did I
tell
you, then," Ringfinger said. "What did I
say
?"
Ethan leaned forward to see how the old man had translated the words of the oracular clam.
FELD IS THE WANTED ONE
FELD HAS THE STUFF HE NEEDS
When he read these words, Ethan felt a strange warmth fill his belly.
He
was the wanted one—the champion. He had the stuff. He turned back to look at Johnny Speakwater, flush with gratitude toward the clam for having such faith in him when no one else did. What he saw, when he turned, made him cry out in horror.
"
The crow!
" he said. "He has Johnny!"
In all the excitement over the words of the prophecy, the prophet had been forgotten.
"It ain't a crow," Cinquefoil said. "It's a raven. I'd lay even money it's Coyote himself."
When their backs were turned, the great black bird must have swooped down from the trees. Now it was lurching his way skyward with the clam clutched in both talons. Its wings beat fitfully against the air. It was a huge and powerful bird, but the enormous clam was giving it problems. It dipped and staggered and listed to one side. Ethan could hear the clam whistling and burbling in desperation as it was carried away.
Something came over Ethan then. Perhaps he was feeling charged from the vote of confidence Johnny Speakwater had given him. Or perhaps he was just angered, as any of us would be, by seeing an outrage perpetrated on an innocent clam. He had seen birds on the Fauna Channel making meals out of bivalves. He had a vision of Johnny Speakwater being dropped from the sky onto some rocks, the great stony shell shattered and lying in shards. He saw the sharp yellow beak of the raven ripping into the featureless, soft grayish-pink flesh that was all Johnny Speakwater had for a body. In any case he took off down the beach, after the raven, shouting, "Hey! You come back here! Hey!"
The raven was not making good time under all that weight. The nearer he got to the robber bird, the angrier Ethan got. Now he was just underneath the struggling pair of wings, right at the edge of the trees. A few seconds more and he would have run out of beach. The whistling of the clam was more piteous than ever. Ethan wanted to do something to help Johnny Speakwater, to justify its faith in him, to prove to the ferishers that he was not just a raw and unformed puppy.
There was something in Ethan's hand, round and hard and cool as a sound argument. He looked down. It was the ferisher baseball. Without considering questions of air resistance or trajectory, he heaved the ball skyward in the direction of the raven. It arced skyward and struck the bird with neat precision on the head. There was a sickening
crack
. The bird squawked, and fluttered, and let go of Johnny Speakwater. A moment later something heavy as a boulder and rough as a brick smacked Ethan in the chest, and he felt a blast of something warm and marine splash across his face, and then he felt his legs go out from under him. The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was the voice of the ferisher chief, Cinquefoil.
"Sign that kid up," he said.
ETHAN OPENED HIS EYES.
He was lying in his bed, in his bedroom, in the pink house on top of the hill. From the singing of the birds and the softness of the gray light at the window, he guessed that it was morning. He sat up and took his wristwatch from the nightstand beside his bed. His father had designed and assembled the watch for him, using parts from a store down in Tacoma called Geek World. The face of the watch was covered in buttons—it was like a little keyboard—and there was a liquid-crystal screen. Mr. Feld had loaded the watch with all kinds of interesting and possibly useful functions, but Ethan could never figure out how to do anything with it but tell the time and the day. Which was 7:24
A.M
., Saturday the ninth. Only a little more than a minute, then, since a foul-smelling werefox who called himself Cutbelly had appeared, squatting on Ethan's chest, to extend an invitation from another world. He heard the familiar Saturday sound of his father banging around down in the kitchen.
If this were a work of fiction, the author would now be obliged to have Ethan waste a few moments wondering if he had dreamed the events of the past few hours. Since, however, every word of this account is true, the reader will not be surprised to learn that Ethan had no doubt whatsoever that in the company of a shadowtail he had leaped from one hidden branch of the Tree of Worlds to another—to the realm that in books was sometimes called Faerie—for the second time in his life. He knew perfectly well that he really had met a sort of fairy king, there, and seen a ballpark made from a giant's bones, and rescued an oracular clam with one lucky toss of a ball. Ethan could tell the difference between the nonsensical business of a dream and the wondrous logic of a true adventure. But if Ethan had needed further proof of his having passed a few hours in the Summerlands, he need have looked no further than the book that was lying on his pillow, just beside the dent where his slumbering head had been.
It was small—of course—about the size of book of matches, bound in dark green leather. On the spine was stamped, in ant-high golden letters,
How to Catch Lightning and Smoke
, and on the title page the author's name was given as one E. Peavine. The print inside was almost too small for Ethan to make out. He could tell from the diagrams, though, that the book concerned baseball—specifically, the position of catcher. Of all the positions in the game, this was the one, with its mysterious mask and armor, to which Ethan had always felt the most drawn. But the fact that to play catcher you really had to understand the rules of the game had always scared him away.
He got up and went over to his desk. At the back of a drawer, under the detritus of several fine hobbies that had never quite taken, among them stamp collecting, rock collecting, and the weaving of pot holders from colored elastic bands, Ethan found a magnifying glass his father had given him for his eleventh birthday. Mr. Feld was a passionate collector of both stamps and rocks. (He also wove a pretty decent pot holder.) Ethan climbed back into bed, pulled the blanket up over himself, and, with the help of the glass, began to read the introduction.
"The first and last duty of the lover of the game of baseball," Peavine's book began,
whether in the stands or on the field, is the same as that of the lover of life itself: to pay attention to it. When it comes to the position of catcher, as all but fools and shortstops will freely acknowledge, this solemn requirement is doubled.
