Werewolves in Their Youth

The Harris Fetko Story

THE HOTEL IN TACOMA was a Luxington Parc. There was one in Spokane, one in Great Falls, and another in downtown Saskatoon. It was half motor lodge, half state-of-the-art correctional institution, antacid pink with gun-slit windows. There was a stink of chlorine from the waterfall in the atrium where the chimes of the elevators echoed all night with a sound like a dental instrument hitting a cold tile floor. A message from Norm Fetko, Harris’s father, was waiting at the desk on Friday night when the team got in. It said that on the previous Friday Fetko’s wife had given birth to a son and that the next afternoon, at three o’clock, they were going to remove his little foreskin, of all things, in a Jewish religious ceremony to be held, of all places, at Fetko’s car dealership up in Northgate. Whether by design or hotel policy, the message was terse, and Harris’s invitation to his half brother’s bris was only implied.

When Harris got upstairs to his room, he sat with his hand on the telephone. The passage of four years since his last contact with Fetko had done little to incline him to forgiveness. He tended, as did most commentators on the Harris Fetko story, to blame his father for his own poor character and the bad things that had happened to him. He decided it would be not only best for everyone but also highly satisfying not to acknowledge in any way his father’s attempt at renewing contact, an attempt whose motives, with an uncharitableness born of long experience, Harris suspected at once.

He picked up the receiver and dialed Bob Badham. There was no answer. Harris set the receiver down on the floor of his room — it was in his contract that he got a room to himself — lay down alongside it, and squeezed out the one thousand abdominal crunches he had been squeezing out every night since he was eleven years old. When he had finished, he got up, went into the bathroom, and looked at himself in the mirror with approval and dispassion. He was used from long habit to thinking of his body as having a certain monetary value or as capable of being translated, mysteriously, into money, and if it were somehow possible, he would have paid a handsome sum to purchase himself. He turned away from the mirror and sat down on the lid of the toilet to trim the nails of his right hand. When his nails were clipped and filed square, he went back out to pick up the telephone. It was still ringing. He hung up and dialed Bob’s work number.

“Screw you, Bob,” Harris said cheerfully to Bob Badham’s voice-mail box. “I mean, hello.” He then left a detailed account of his current whereabouts and telephone number, the clean result of his most recent urine test, and the next destination on the team’s schedule, which was Boise, a Holiday Inn, on July 5. Harris possessed the sort of wild, formless gift that attracted the gaze of harsh men and disciplinarians, and the whole of his twenty-six years had been lived under the regimens of hard-asses. Bob Badham was merely the latest of these.

There was a knock at the door. Harris went to answer it in his pin-stripe bikini briefs, hoping, not quite unconsciously, that he would find an attractive female member of the Western Washington Association of Mortgage Brokers (here for their annual convention) come to see if it was really true that the briefly semi-notorious Harris Fetko was in the hotel.

“Why aren’t you in bed?” said Lou Sammartino.

The coach of the Regina Kings club of the North American Professional Indoor Football League was not, as it happened, a hard-ass. He indulged his players far more than most of them deserved — housing them with his family when things went badly for them; remembering their birthdays; nudging them to save receipts, phone their wives, pay their child support. He was an intelligent man of long experience who, like many coaches Harris had played for, believed, at this point in his career rather desperately, in the myth of the football genius, a myth in which Harris himself, having been raised by a football genius, had learned by the age of seventeen to put no stock whatever. Lou Sammartino believed that the problem of winning at football was surely one susceptible to the systematic application of an inspired and unbiased mind. His lifetime record as a coach, including a stint in the short-lived Mexican Football League of 1982, was 102–563. He pushed past Harris and barked at his quarterback to close the door. He was hunched and rotund, with a jowly, pocked face and immense black-rimmed spectacles. The smell of his cologne was exactly like that of the tiny red cardboard pine trees that dangle from the rearview mirrors of taxicabs.

“What’s the matter?” said Harris. He looked out into the hallway, in both directions, then closed the door against the stiff artificial breeze that came howling down the deserted corridor.

“We need to talk.” Lou sat down on the bed and studied Harris. His watery brown eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were beautiful in a way that suited his losing record. “You called your PO?”

“I left a message.”

“Aren’t you supposed to see him in person when you’re home?”

“I’m not home,” said Harris. “Technically. My home is Seattle. We’re in Tacoma.”

“Technically,” said Lou. “A word much beloved of fuckups.”

“Something to drink?” Harris went to the minibar. There was nothing in it except for a rattling ice tray and a ghostly smell of caulk. The minibars were always empty in Luxington Parcs and in most of the other hotels the Regina Kings patronized. Often they were not even plugged in. “I’m supposed to have six bottles of mineral water,” Harris said. He tried not to sound petulant, but it was difficult, because he was feeling petulant.

“Aw,” said Lou.

“I’m sick of this!” Harris slammed the refrigerator door shut. “Every fucking time I walk into my room and open the minibar door, there’s supposed to be six fucking bottles of mineral water in there.” The slammed door rebounded and bashed into the wall beside the minibar. Its handle gouged a deep hole in the wallboard. Crumbs of plaster spattered the floor. Harris ran his fingers along the edges of the hole he had made in the wall. A feeling of remorse took wing in his chest, but with an old, sure instinct, he caught it and neatly twisted its neck. He turned to Lou, trying to look certain of himself and his position. The truth was that Harris didn’t even like mineral water; he thought it tasted like saliva. But it was in his contract. “So, okay, talk. It’s past my bedtime.”

“Harris, in a minute or two there’s someone coming up here with a proposition for you.” Just as he said this, there was another knock at the door. Harris jumped. “He wants to offer you a job.”

“I already have a job.”

Lou turned up the corners of his mouth but somehow failed to produce a viable smile.

“Lou,” said Harris, and his heart started to pound. “Please tell me the league isn’t folding.”

There had been rumors to this effect since before the season even began; attendance at games in all but a few sports-starved cities was declining by a thousand or more every weekend, the owner of the Portland team had been murdered by Las Vegas wiseguys, and the Vancouver bank on whose line of credit the NAPIFL depended for its operating costs was under investigation by the government of Canada.

Lou stroked the bedspread, smoothing it, watching the back of his hand.

“I just want to play out the schedule,” he said sadly. “I could be happy with that.”

“Harris?” said a man on the other side of the door. “You there?”

Harris put on his jeans and went to the door.

“Oly,” he said. He took a step back into the room. The man at the door was enormous, six feet eight inches tall, just shy of three hundred pounds. Like Norm Fetko a member of the 1955 national champions and — unlike Fetko — a successful businessman, purveyor of a popular topical analgesic, Oly Olafsen had always been the biggest man Harris knew, a chunk of the northern ice cap, a piece of masonry, fifteen tons of stone, oak, and gristle supporting eight cubic inches of grinning blond head. He wore silver aviator eyeglasses and a custom-tailored suit, metallic gray, so large and oddly proportioned that it was nearly unrecognizable as an article of human clothing and appeared rather to have been designed to straiten an obstreperous circus elephant or to keep the dust off some big, delicate piece of medical imaging technology.

“How’s my boy?” said Oly.

It had been Oly Olafsen’s money, more or less, that Harris had used, more or less without Oly’s knowing about it, to purchase the pound of cocaine the police had found under the rear bench of Harris’s 300ZX when they pulled him over that night on Ravenna Avenue. He gave Harris’s hand a squeeze that compressed the very bones.

“So,” he went on, “the coach has got himself another son after all these years. That’s a thought, isn’t it? Wonder what he’s got cooked up for this one.”

This remark angered Harris, whom the sporting world for two hectic and disappointing collegiate seasons had known as Frankenback. Among the failings of his character exposed during that time was a total inability to stand up to teasing about any aspect of his life, his father’s experimentation least of all. With a great effort and out of an old habit of deference to his father’s cronies, he got himself to smile, then realized that Oly wasn’t teasing him at all. On the contrary, there had been in Oly’s soft voice a disloyal wrinkle of concern for the fate, at his great idol’s hands, of the latest little Fetko to enter the world.

“Yeah, he asked me out to the showroom tomorrow,” Harris said. “To the thing where they, what’s that, circumcise the kid.”

“Are you people Jewish?” said Lou, surprised. “I didn’t know.”

“We’re not. Fetko isn’t. I guess his new wife must be.”

“I’ll be there. Ah!” Gingerly — his knees were an ancient ruin of cartilage and wire — Oly lowered himself into the desk chair, which creaked in apparent horror at the slow approach of his massive behind. “As a matter of fact, I’m paying for the darn thing.” Oly smiled, then took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. When he put the glasses back on, he wasn’t smiling anymore. “The coach has got himself into a little bit of a tight spot out there in Northgate,” he said, pressing his palms together as if they represented the terrific forces that were putting the squeeze on Fetko. “I know things haven’t been, well, the greatest between you two since … everything that happened, but the coach — Harris, he’s really putting his life back together. He’s not—”

“Get to the point,” said Harris.

An odd expression came over Oly’s generally peaceful and immobile face. His eyebrows reached out to each other over the bridge of his nose, and his tiny, pale lips compressed into a pout. He was unhappy, possibly even actively sad. Harris had never imagined that Oly might ever be feeling anything but hunger and gravitation.

“Harris, I’m not going to lie to you, the old man could really use a little help,” said Oly. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. I don’t know if Lou has mentioned it, but the coach and I—”

“I told him,” said Lou. “Harris isn’t interested.”

“Isn’t he?” Oly looked at Lou, his face once again a region of blankness, his eyes polite and twinkling. He had pleasant, vacant little eyes that, along with his bulk and a recipe purchased in 1963 from a long-dead Chinese herbalist in the International District for $250, had enabled him to do what was necessary to make Power Rub the number-three topical analgesic in the western United States. “Somebody might think he would be very interested in finding another job, seeing as how this outfit of yours is about to go belly-up.” He turned his flashbulb eyes toward Harris now. “Seeing as how what they call gainful employment is a condition of his parole.”

“If that happens, and I don’t personally feel that it will, Harris can find another job. He doesn’t need any help from you.”

“What is he going to do? He doesn’t know how to do anything but be a quarterback! It’s in his genes, it’s in his blood particles. It’s wired into his darn brain. No, I figure he has to be very interested in hearing about an opportunity like this. A chance to actually redefine the position, at twice his present salary, in front of a guaranteed national cable audience of forty-four million homes.”

Harris was accustomed to having his disposition discussed and his fate decided, in his presence, by other people; it was part of that same mysterious alchemy that could transmute his body into cash and of the somewhat less obscure process that had sent him to Ellensburg for nineteen months. But at the mention of cable television, he could not restrain himself.

“What is it?” he said. “What opportunity?” Oly reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a manila envelope, folded in half. He took a color brochure from the envelope and handed it to Harris. Harris sat down on the bed to read. It was a prospectus designed to attract investors to a league that would feature a sport that the brochure called Powerball, “the first new major American sport in a hundred years,” to be played in every major city in the United States, apparently by men in garish uniforms that were part samurai armor and part costume de ballet, one of whom was depicted, on the airbrushed cover of the brochure, swinging across the playing arena from a striped rappelling cable. The description was vague, but, as far as Harris could tell, Powerball appeared to be an amalgam of rugby, professional wrestling, and old pirate movies. It was not football or anything close to football. Once Harris realized this, he skimmed through such phrases as “speed, drama, and intense physical action … the best elements of today’s most popular sports … our proposed partnership with the Wrestling Channel … all the elements are in place … revolutionary, popular, and, above all, profitable …” until he turned to the last page and found a photograph of his father beside a caption that identified him as “coaching great Norm Fetko, inventor of Powerball, part owner and coach of the Seattle franchise.”

“Fetko invented this crap?” said Harris, tossing the brochure onto the floor.

“It came to him in a dream,” said Oly, looking solemn. He raised his hands to his eyes and spread his thick fingers, watching the air between them as it shimmered with another one of Norm Fetko’s lunatic visions. “A guy … with a football under his arm … swinging from a rope.” Oly shook his head as if awestruck by the glimpse Harris’s father had vouchsafed him into the mystic origins of the future of American sport. “This will be big, Harris. We already have a line on investors in nine cities. Our lawyers are working out the last few kinks in the TV contract. This could be a very, very big thing.”

“Big,” said Harris. “Yeah, I get it now.” For he saw, with admiration and to his horror, that at this late stage of his career Fetko had managed to come up with yet another way to ruin the lives and fortunes of hapless elevens of men. None of Fetko’s other failures — his golf resort out in the Banana Belt of Washington, his “revolutionary” orange football, his brief (pioneering, in retrospect) foray into politics as a candidate with no political convictions, his attempt to breed and raise the greatest quarterback the world would ever see — had operated in isolation. They had all roped in, ridden on the backs of, and ultimately broken a large number of other people. And around all of Fetko’s dealings and misdealings, Oly Olafsen had hovered, loving sidekick, pouring his money down Fetko’s throat like liquor. “That’s why he called. He wants me to play for him again.”

“Imagine the media, Harris, my gosh,” said Oly. “Norm and Harris Fetko reunited, that would sell a few tickets.”

Lou winced and sat down on the bed next to Harris. He put his hand on Harris’s shoulder. “Harris, you don’t want to do this.”

“No kidding,” said Harris. “Oly,” he said to Oly. “I hate my father. I don’t want to have anything to do with him. Or you. You guys all fucked me over once.”

“Hey, now, kid.” Another crack of grief opened in the glacial expanse of his face. “Look, you hate me, that’s one thing, but I know you don’t—”

“I hate him!”

Inside Harris Fetko the frontier between petulance and rage was generally left unguarded, and he crossed it now without slowing down. He stood up and went for Oly, wondering if somewhere in the tiny interval between the big man’s jaw and shoulders he might find a larynx to get his thumbs around. Oly started to rise, but his shattered knees slowed him, and before he could regain his feet, Harris had kicked the tiny chair out from under him. A sharp pain went whistling up Harris’s shin, and then his foot began to throb like a trumpet. The right foreleg of the wooden chair splintered from the frame, the chair tipped, and Oly Olafsen hit the flecked aquamarine carpet. His impact was at once loud and muffled, like the collision of a baseball bat and a suitcase filled with water.

“I’m sorry,” Harris said.

Oly looked up at him. His meaty fingers wrapped around the broken chair leg and clenched it. His breath blew through his nostrils as loud as a horse’s. Then he let go of the chair leg and shrugged. When Harris offered a hand, Oly took it.

“I just want to tell you something, Harris,” he said, smoothing down his sleeves. He winched up his trousers by the belt, then attended to the tectonic slippage of the shoulder pads in his jacket. “Everything the coach has, okay, is tied up in this thing. Not money. The coach doesn’t have any money. So far the money is mostly coming from me.” With a groan he stooped to retrieve the fallen brochure, then slipped it back into its envelope. “What the coach has tied up in this thing, it can’t be paid back or defaulted on or covered by a bridge loan.” He tapped the rolled manila envelope against the center of his chest. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“No, you will not,” said Harris as Oly went out. He tried to sound as though he were not in terrible pain. “I’m not going.”

Lou lifted Harris’s foot and bent the big toe experimentally. Harris groaned. A tear rolled down his cheek.

“You broke it,” said Lou. “Aw, Harris.”

“I’m sorry, Coach,” said Harris, falling backward on the bed. “Fucking Fetko, man. It’s all his fault.”

“Everything else, maybe it was Fetko’s fault,” said Lou, though he sounded doubtful. He picked up the telephone and asked room service to bring up a bucket of ice. “This was your fault.”

When the ice came, he filled a towel with it and held it against Harris’s toe for an hour until the swelling had gone down. Then he taped the big toe to its neighbor, patted Harris on the head, and went back to his room to revise the playbook for tomorrow. Before he went out, he turned.

“Harris,” he said, “you’ve never confided in me. And you’ve never particularly followed any of the copious advice I’ve been so generous as to offer you over the last few months.”

“Coach—”

“But regardless of that, I’m foolishly going to make one last little try.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on a rumpled shirttail. “I think you ought to go to that thing tomorrow.” He put his glasses back on again and blinked his eyes. “It’s your brother that’ll be lying there with his little legs spread.”

“Fuck the little bastard,” said Harris, with the easy and good-natured callousness that, like so much about the game of football, had always come so naturally to him. “I hope they slice the fucking thing clean off.”

Lou went out, shaking his big, sorrowful head. Ten minutes later there was another knock at the door. This time it was not a lady mortgage broker but a reporter for the Morning News Tribune come to poke around in the embers of the Harris Fetko conflagration. Harris lay on the bed with his foot in an ice pack and told, once again, the sorry tale of how his father had ruined his life and made him into all the sad things he was today. When the reporter asked him what had happened to his foot and the chair, Harris said that he had tripped while running to answer the phone.

They beat Tacoma 10-9, on a field goal in the last eight seconds of the game. Harris scrambled for the touchdown, kicked the extra point with his off foot, and then, when in the last minute of the game it became clear that none of the aging farm implements and large pieces of antique cabinetry who made up his backfield and receiving corps were going to manage to get the ball into the end zone, he himself, again with his left foot, nailed the last three points needed to keep them happy for one more day back in Regina.

When the team came off the field, they found the Kings’ owner, Irwin Selwyn, waiting in the locker room, holding an unlit cigar in one hand and a pale blue envelope in the other, looking at his two-tone loafers. The men from the front office stood around him, working their Adam’s apples up and down over the knots of their neckties. Selwyn had on blue jeans and a big yellow sweater with the word KINGS knit across it in blue. He stuck the cigar between his teeth, opened the blue envelope, and unfolded the letter from the league office, which with terse, unintentional elegance regretfully informed the teams and players of the NAPIFL that the standings at the end of that day’s schedule of games would be duly entered into the record books as final. Lou Sammartino, having coached his team to first place in its division and the best record in the league, wandered off into the showers and sat down. Irwin Selwyn shook everyone’s hand and had his secretary give each player a set of fancy wrenches (he owned a hardware chain) and a check for what the player would have been owed had Lou Sammartino been granted his only remaining desire. Shortly thereafter, twenty-five broken giants trudged out to the parking lot with their socket wrenches and caught the bus to the rest of their lives.

Harris went back to his room at the Luxington Parc, turned on the television, and watched a half-hour commercial for a handheld vacuum device that sheared the bellies of beds and sofas of their eternal wool of dust. He washed his underpants in the sink. He drank two cans of diet root beer and ate seven Slim Jims. Then he switched off the television, pulled a pillow over his head, and cried. The serene, arctic blankness with which he was rumored, and in fact did struggle, to invest all his conscious processes of thought was only a hollow illusion. He was racked by that particular dread of the future that plagues superseded deities and washed-up backs. He saw himself carrying an evening six-pack up to his rented room, wearing slacks and a name tag at some job, standing with the rest of the failures of the world at the back of a very long line, waiting to claim something that in the end would turn out to be an empty tin bowl with his own grinning skull reflected in its bottom. He went into the bathroom and threw up.

When he reemerged from the bathroom, the queasiness was gone but the dread of his future remained. He picked up the phone and called around town until he found himself a car. His tight end, a Tacoma native, agreed, for a price they finally fixed at seventeen dollars — seventeen having been the number on the tight end’s 1979 Washington State Prep Championship jersey — to bring his brother’s car around to the hotel in half an hour. Harris showered, changed into a tan poplin suit, seersucker shirt, and madras tie, and checked out of his room. When he walked out of the Luxington Parc, he found a 1979 Chevrolet Impala, eggplant with a white vinyl top, waiting for him under the porte cochere.

“Don’t turn the wipers on,” said Deloyd White. “It blows the fuse on the radio. Be honest, it blows a lot of fuses. Most of them.”

“What if it rains?”

Deloyd looked out at the afternoon, damp and not quite warm, the blue sky wan and smeary. He scratched at the thin, briery tangle of beard on his chin.

“If it rains you just got to drive really fast,” he said.

As Harris drove north on I-5, he watched nervously as the cloak of blue sky grew threadbare and began to show, in places, its eternal gray interfacing of clouds. But the rain held off, and Harris was able to make it all the way out to Northgate without breaking the speed laws. The Chevy made a grand total of seven cars parked on the lot of Norm Fetko’s New and Used Buick-Isuzu, an establishment that had changed hands and product lines a dozen times since Pierce Arrow days. It sat, a showroom of peeling white stucco, vaguely art deco, next to a low cinder-block garage on one of the saddest miles of Aurora Avenue, between a gun shop and a place that sold grow lights. Fetko had bought the place from a dealer in Pacers and Gremlins, banking on his local celebrity to win him customers at the very instant in history when Americans ceased to care who it was that sold them their cars. Harris pulled in between two Le Sabres with big white digits soaped onto their windshields, straightened his tie, and started for the open door of the dealership.

A tall, fair-haired salesman, one of the constantly shifting roster of former third-stringers and practice dummies Fetko could always call upon to man the oars of his argosies as they coursed ever nearer to the maelstrom, was propped against the doorway, smoking a cigarette, as Harris walked up. He was stuffed imperfectly into his cheap suit, and his face looked puffy. He lounged with a coiled air of impatience, tipping and rocking on the balls of his feet. His hair was like gold floss.

“Hey, Junior,” he said. He gestured with a thumb. “They’re all in the back room.”

“Did they do it already?”

“I don’t think so. I think they were waiting for you.”

“But I said I wasn’t going to come,” said Harris, irritated to find that his change of heart had come as a surprise only to him.

He walked across the showroom, past three metal desks, three filing cabinets, and three wastebaskets, all enameled in a cheery shade of surgical glove; three beige telephones with rotary dials; a dismantled mimeograph; and an oak hat rack that was missing all of its hooks but one, from which there hung an empty plastic grocery sack. There was no stock on the floor, a bare beige linoleum expanse layered with a composite detritus of old cigarette ash and the lost limbs of insects. The desk chairs were tucked neatly under the desks, and the desktops themselves were bare of everything but dust. Aside from a bookshelf filled with the binders and thick manuals of the automobile trade and a few posters of last season’s new models tacked up amid black-and-white photographs of the owner, in his glory days, fading back to pass, there was little to suggest that Norm Fetko’s New and Used was not a defunct concern and had not been so for a very long time.

“I knew you’d come,” said Fetko’s wife, hurrying across the back room to greet him. She was not at all what he had imagined — an ample, youngish bottle blonde with an unlikely suntan and the soft, wide-eyed look, implying a certain preparedness to accept necessary pain, that Fetko had favored in all the women he had gotten involved with after Harris’s mother. She was small, with thin arms and a skinny neck, her hair like black excelsior. Her eyes were deep set. She was certainly no younger than forty. Her name was Marilyn Levine.

“I almost didn’t,” he insisted. “I’m, uh, not too wild about … these things.”

“Have you been to a bris before?”

Harris shook his head.

“I’m not even going to be in the room,” Marilyn said. “That’s what a lightweight I am.” She was wearing a loose burgundy velvet dress and ballet shoes. This was another surprise. Over time, most of the women in Fetko’s life allowed themselves to become, as it were, themed, favoring grass-green muumuus patterned with stiff-arming running backs, goalposts, and footballs turning end over end. Marilyn touched a hand to Harris’s arm. “Did you know the coach stopped drinking?”

“When did he do that?”

“Almost a year ago,” she said. “Not quite.”

“That’s good news,” said Harris.

“He isn’t the same man, Harris,” she told him. “You’ll see that.”

“Okay,” said Harris doubtfully.

“Come say hi.”

She led him past the buffet, three card tables pushed together and spread with food enough for ten times as many guests as there were in attendance. Aside from one or two of Fetko’s employees and a dozen or so members of Marilyn’s family, among them an authentic-looking Jew, with the little hat and the abolitionist beard, whom Marilyn introduced as her brother, the room was empty. A few women were huddled at the back of the room around a cerulean football that Harris supposed must be the blanketed new Fetko.

In the old days, at a function like this, there would have been a great ring of standing stones around Fetko, dolmens and menhirs in pistachio pants, with nicknames like Big Mack and One-Eye. Some of the members of the ’55 national champions, Harris knew, had died or moved to faraway places; the rest had long since been burned, used up, worn out, or, in one case, sent to prison by one or another of Fetko’s schemes. Now there remained only Oly Olafsen, Red Johnnie Green, and Hugh Eggert with his big cigar. Red Johnnie had on a black suit with a funereal tie, Oly was wearing another of his sharkskin tarpaulins, and Hugh had solved the troublesome problem of dressing for the dark ritual of an alien people by coming in his very best golf clothes. When they saw Harris, they pounded him on the back and shook his hand. They squeezed his biceps, assessed his grip, massaged his shoulders, jammed their stubbly chins into the crook of his neck, and, in the case of Hugh Eggert, gave his left buttock a farmerly slap. Harris had been in awe of them most of his life. Now he regarded them with envy and dismay. They had grown old without ever maturing: quarrelsome, salacious boys zipped into enormous rubber man-suits. Harris, on the other hand, had bid farewell to his childhood aeons ago, without ever having managed to grow up.

“Harris,” said Fetko. “How about that.” The tip of his tongue poked out from the corner of his mouth, and he hitched up the waist of his pants, as if he were about to attempt something difficult. He was shorter than Harris remembered — fatter, grayer, older, sadder, more tired, more bald, with more broken blood vessels in his cheeks. He was, Harris quickly calculated, sixty-one, having already been most of the way through his thirties, a head coach in Denver with a master’s in sports physiology, before he selected Harris’s mother from a long list of available candidates and began his grand experiment in breeding. As usual he was dressed today in black high-tops, baggy black ripstop pants, and a black polo shirt. The muscles of his arms stretched the ribbed armbands of his shirtsleeves. With his black clothes, his close-cropped hair, and his eyes that were saved from utter coldness by a faint blue glint of lunacy, he looked like a man who had been trained in his youth to drop out of airplanes in the dead of night and strangle enemy dictators in their sleep.

“Son,” he said.

“Hey there, Coach,” said Harris.

The moment during which they might have shaken hands, or even — in an alternate-historical universe where the Chinese discovered America and a ten-year-old Adolf Hider was trampled to death by a passing milk wagon — embraced, passed, as it always did. Fetko nodded.

“I heard you played good today,” he said.

Harris lowered his head to hide the fact that he was blushing.

“I was all right,” he said. “Congratulations on the kid. What’s his name?”

“Sid Luckman,” said Fetko, and the men around him, except for Harris, laughed. Their laughter was nervous and insincere, as if Fetko had said something dirty. “Being as how he’s a Jewish boy.” Fetko nodded with tolerant, Einsteinian pity toward his old buddies. “These bastards here think it’s a joke.”

No, no, they reassured him. Sid Luckman was an excellent choice. Still, you had to admit—

“Luckman’s the middle name,” said Harris.

“That’s right.”

“I like it.”

Fetko nodded again. He didn’t care if Harris liked it or not. Harris was simply — had always been — there to know when Fetko wasn’t joking.

“He’s very glad to see you,” said Marilyn Levine, with a hard edge in her voice, prodding Fetko. “He’s been worrying about it all week.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said Fetko.

Marilyn gave Harris a furtive nod to let him know that she had been telling the truth. She was standing with her arm still laced through Harris’s, smelling pleasantly of talcum. Harris gave her hand a squeeze. He had spent the better part of his childhood waiting for Fetko to bring someone like Marilyn Levine home to raise him. Now he had a brief fantasy of yanking her out of the room by this warm hand, of hustling her and young Sid Luckman into the aubergine Chevy Impala and driving them thousands of miles through the night to a safe location. His own mother had fled Fetko when Harris was six, promising to send for him as soon as she landed on her feet. The summons never came. She had married again, and then again after that, and had moved two dozen times over the last fifteen years. Harris let go of his stepmother’s hand. Probably there was no such safe place to hide her and the baby. Everywhere they went, she would find men like Fetko. For all Harris knew, he was a man like Fetko, too.

“Hello?”

Everyone turned. There was a wizened man standing behind Harris, three feet tall, a thousand years old, carrying a black leather pouch under his arm.

“I am Dr. Halbenzoller,” he said regretfully. He had a large welt on his forehead and wore a bewildered, fearful expression, as if he had misplaced his eyeglasses and were feeling his way through the world. “Where are the parents?”

“I’m the boy’s father,” said Fetko, taking the old man’s hand. “This is the mother — Marilyn. She’s the observant one, here.”

Dr. Halbenzoller turned his face toward Marilyn. He looked alarmed.

“The father is not Jewish?”

Marilyn shook her head. “No, but we spoke about it over the phone, Dr. Halbenzoller, don’t you remember?”

“I don’t remember anything,” said Dr. Halbenzoller. He looked around the room, as if trying to remember how he had got to the outlandish place in which he now found himself. His gaze lingered a moment on Harris, wonderingly and with evident disapproval, as if he were looking at a Great Dane someone had dressed up in a madras jacket and taught to smile.

“I’m an existential humanist,” Fetko told him. “That’s always been my great asset as a coach. Over the long series, an atheistic coach will always beat a coach who believes in God.” Fetko, whose own lifetime record was an existential 163–162, had been out of coaching for quite a while now, and Harris could see that he missed being interviewed. “Anyway, I don’t feel I could really give the Jewish faith a fair shake—”

Dr. Halbenzoller turned to Marilyn.

“Tell them I’d like to begin,” he said, as if she were his interpreter. He took the pouch from under his arm. “Where is the child?”

Marilyn led him over to the back of the room, where, beside the huddle of women, a card table had been set up and draped in a piece of purple velvet. Dr. Halbenzoller undid the buckles on his pouch and opened it, revealing a gleaming set of enigmatic tools.

“And the sandek,” he said to Marilyn. “You have one?”

Marilyn looked at Fetko.

“Norm?”

Fetko looked down at his hands.

“Norm.”

Fetko shrugged and looked up. He studied Harris’s face and took a step toward him. Involuntarily, Harris took a step back. “It’s like a godfather,” Fetko said. “To the kid. Marilyn and I were wondering.”

Harris was honored, and wildly touched, but he didn’t want to let on. “If you want,” he said. “What do I have to do?”

“Come stand next to me,” said Dr. Halbenzoller slowly, as you would speak to a well-dressed and intelligent dog.

Harris went over to the velvet-covered table and stood beside it, close enough to Dr. Halbenzoller to smell the steam in his ironed suit.

“Do you have to be a doctor to do this?” he asked.

“I’m a dentist,” said Dr. Halbenzoller. “Fifty years. This is just a hobby of mine.” He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and took out a slim volume of cracked black leather. “Bring the child.”

Sidney Luckman Fetko was brought forward and placed into Harris’s arms. He was wide awake, motionless, his lumpy little pinch-pot face peering out from the blue swaddling cloth. He weighed nothing at all. Fetko’s wife left the room. Dr. Halbenzoller opened the little book and began to chant. The language — Hebrew, Harris supposed — sounded harsh and angular and complaining. Sid Luckman’s eyes widened, as if he were listening. His head hadn’t popped entirely back into place yet after his passage through Marilyn Levine, and his features were twisted up a little on one side, giving him a sardonic expression. This is my brother, thought Harris. This is Fetko’s other son.

He was so lost in the meaning of this that he didn’t notice when several seconds had gone by in silence. Harris looked up. Dr. Halbenzoller was reaching out to Harris. Harris just looked at his hands, callused and yellow but unwrinkled, like a pair of old feet.

“It’s all right, Harris,” said Fetko. “Give him the baby.”

“Excuse me,” Harris said. He tucked Sid Luckman under his arm and headed for the fire door.

He sprinted across the back lot, past a long, rusting, red-and-white trailer home with striped aluminum awnings in which Harris’s mother had once direly predicted that Fetko would end his days, toward a swath of open land that stretched away behind the dealership, a vast tangle of blackberry brambles, dispirited fir trees, and renegade pachysandra escaped from some distant garden. In his late adolescence, Harris had often picked his way to a large clearing at the center of the tangle, a circular sea of dead grass where for decades the mechanics who worked in the service bays had tossed their extinguished car batteries and pans of broken-down motor oil. At the center of this cursed spot, Harris would he on his back, looking at the pigeon-colored Seattle sky, and expend his brain’s marvelous capacity for speculation on topics such as women's breasts, the big money, and Italian two-seaters.

These days there was no need to pick one’s way — a regular path had been cleared through the brush — and as they approached the clearing, Harris slowed. The woods were birdless, and the only sounds were the hum of traffic from Aurora Avenue, the snapping of twigs under his feet, and a low, hostile grunting from the baby. It had turned into a cold summer afternoon. The wind blew in from the north, smelling of brine and rust. As Harris approached the clearing, he found himself awash in regret, not for the thing he had just done or for shanked kicks or lost yardage or for the trust he had placed, so mistakenly, in others during his short, trusting, mistaken life, but for something more tenuous and faint, tied up in the memory of those endless afternoons spent lying on his back in that magical circle of poison, wasting his thoughts on things that now meant so little to him. Then he and Sid fell into the clearing.

Most of the trees around it, he saw, had been brought down, while those that remained had been stripped of their lower branches and painted, red or blue, with a white letter, wobbly and thin, running ten feet up the trunk. Exactly enough trees had been left, going around, to spell out the word POWERBALL. Harris had never seen a painted tree before, and the effect was startling. From a very tall pole at the center of the circle, each of nine striped rappelling cables extended, like the ribs of an umbrella, toward a wooden platform at the top of each of the painted trees. The ground had been patiently tilled and turned over, cleared of grass and rubbish, then patted down again, swept smooth and speckless as an infield. At the northern and southern poles of the arena stood a soccer-goal net, spray-painted gold. Someone had also painted a number of imitation billboards advertising Power Rub and the cigarettes, soft drinks, spark plugs, and malt liquors of fantasy sponsors, and nailed them up at key locations around the perimeter. The lettering was crude but the colors were right and if you squinted a little you might almost be persuaded. The care, the hard work, the childish attention to detail, and, above all, the years of misapplied love and erroneous hopefulness that had gone into its planning and construction seemed to Harris to guarantee the arena’s inevitable destruction by wind, weather, and the creeping pachysandra of failure that ultimately entangled all his father’s endeavors and overwhelmed the very people they were most intended to avail. Fetko was asking for it.

“Look what Coach did,” Harris said to Sid, tilting the baby a little so that he might see. “Isn’t that neat?”

Sid Luckman’s face never lost its dour, sardonic air, but Harris found himself troubled by an unexpected spasm of forgiveness. The disaster of Powerball, when finally it unfolded, as small-scale disappointment or as massive financial collapse, would not really be Fetko’s fault. Harris’s entire life had been spent, for better or worse, in the struggling company of men, and he had seen enough by now to know that evergreen ruin wound its leaves and long tendrils around the habitations and plans of all fathers, everywhere, binding them by the ankles and wrists to their sons, whether the fathers asked for it or not.

“Get your ass back in there,” said Fetko, coming up behind them, out of breath. “Asses.”

Harris didn’t say anything. He could feel his father’s eyes on him, but he didn’t turn to look. The baby snuffled and grunted in Harris’s arms.

“I, uh, I did all this myself,” Fetko said after a moment.

“I figured.”

“Maybe later, if you wanted to, we could go over some of the fine points of the game.”

“Maybe we could.”

Fetko shook himself and slapped his palms together. “Fine, but now come on, goddammit. Before the little Jewish gentleman in there seizes up on us.”

Harris nodded. “Okay,” he said.

As he carried Sid past their father, Harris felt his guts contract in an ancient reflex, and he awaited the cuff, jab, karate chop, rabbit punch, head slap, or boot to the seat of his pants that in his youth he had interpreted as a strengthening exercise designed to prepare him for his career as an absorber of terrible impacts but that now, as Fetko popped him on the upper arm hard enough to make him wince, touching him for the first time in five years, he saw as the expression of a sentiment at once so complicated and inarticulate, neither love nor hatred but as elemental as either, that it could only be expressed by contusing the skin. Harris shifted Sid Luckman to his left arm and, for the first time ever, raised a fist to pop Fetko a good one in return. Then he changed his mind and lowered his hand and carried the baby through the woods to the dealership with Fetko following behind them, whistling a tuneless and impatient song through his teeth.

When they got back, Harris handed over Sid Luckman. Dr. Halbenzoller set the baby down on the velvet cloth. He reached into his pouch and took out a rectangular stainless-steel device that looked a little like a cigar trimmer. The baby shook his tiny fists. His legs, unswaddled, beat the air like butterfly wings. Dr. Halbenzoller brought the cigar trimmer closer to his tiny panatela. Then he glanced up at Harris.

“Please,” he said, nodding to the fitful legs, and Harris understood that somebody was going to have to hold his brother down.