Summerland. Michael Chabon
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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 greyish-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 grey 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 armour, 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 coloured 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.
Peavine, Ethan learned, was a ferisher from a region of the Summerlands that, as Peavine put it, “brushed up to” Troy, New York. He had learned the fundamentals of his position during the summers of 1880, ’81, and ’82 by secretly observing the play of a catcher for the Troy Trojans, a human (“reuben” , was Peavine’s term) named William “Buck” Ewing. “These summers spent at the shoulder of the cool and elegant Buck,” Peavine wrote, “as fine a reuben as I have ever encountered, in the dusty green bowl of Trojan Field, remain among the happiest memories of all my long, long life.” When an outbreak of the grey crinkles devastated Peavine’s native mob, he had wandered west and taken up the mask, mitt, and chest protector for a mob of ferishers living at a place called Snake Island “an easy leap from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.” It was here, playing for the Snake Island Wapatos amid the cottonwoods and wildflower glades of the seventy-two-team Flathead League, that he had first begun, in his words, “to grasp the fundamental truth: a baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day.”
“Eth?”
There was a knock at the door to Ethan’s bedroom. He slid the book under his pillow and sat up as his father opened the door and poked his head into the room.
“Breakfast is…” He frowned, looking puzzled. “Ready.”
Ethan saw that he had neglected to dispose of the magnifying glass. He was clutching it in his left hand, with absolutely nothing around him that he might plausibly have been using it to examine. Lamely Ethan held it up to the window next to his bed.
“Spider,” he said. “Really tiny one.”
“A spider!” said his father. “Let me see.” He came over to the bed and Ethan passed him the magnifying glass. “Where?”
Ethan pointed; his father leaned in. A circle of empty air wavered in the watery lens. Then, to Ethan’s surprise, a face emerged, grinning a yellow-toothed grin. A grey face, with a grey mosquito-stinger of a nose, equipped with a twitching black set of wings. Ethan’s tongue seemed to swell in his mouth; he could not utter a sound. He watched in horror as the creature winked at him, waiting for his father’s cry of alarm.
“I don’t see any spider,” Mr. Feld said mildly. He stood up again and the horrible grin vanished; there was nothing at the window but misty Clam Island morning.