Summerland

“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.

“The wind must have blown it away,” Ethan said.

He climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of underpants under the extra-large Hellboy T-shirt he slept in, and followed his father out to the kitchen, to confront the weekly sadness of flannel cakes.

His father set a tall stack in front of him and then sat down with a stack of his own. They were enormous things, Mr. Feld’s flannel cakes, each nearly the size of the plate itself, and there were invariably five or six of them that Ethan was expected to eat. During the week Ethan fixed his own breakfast – cold cereal, or an English muffin spread with peanut butter. This was necessary because Mr. Feld stayed up till all hours in his workshop. This in turn was because the night-time was when Mr. Feld felt the most inventive. Or so he said. Sometimes Ethan suspected that his father simply didn’t like to see the light of day. When Ethan got ready for school or, now that school was out, for a morning walk in the woods or a bike ride over to Jennifer T.’s, Mr. Feld was usually asleep. But on Saturday mornings, no matter how late he had worked, Mr. Feld always woke up, or stayed up, as the case might be, to cook a pancake breakfast for him and Ethan. Pancakes – she called them flannel cakes – had been a specialty of Dr. Feld’s, and the Saturday breakfast was a Feld family tradition. Unfortunately, Mr. Feld was a terrible cook, and his own flannel cakes never failed to live up to their rather unappetising name.

“Well,” Mr. Feld said, tipping the bottle of maple syrup onto his stack. “Let’s see how I did this week.”

“Did you remember the baking powder?” Ethan said, with a shudder. He was still feeling unnerved by the memory of the ugly grey face, with the pointed nose and wicked grin, swimming in the lens of the magnifying glass. “The eggs?”

His father nodded, allowing a large puddle of syrup to form. One of the unspoken but necessary ground rules for eating Mr. Feld’s flannel cakes was that you could use as much syrup as you needed to help you get them down.

“And the vanilla?” Ethan said, pouring his own syrup. He preferred Karo; he had seen a movie once of men in fur hats driving long, sharp steel taps into the tender hearts of Canadian maples, and ever since then had felt too sorry for the trees to eat maple syrup.

Mr. Feld nodded again. He cut himself a fat wedge, pale yellow pinstriped with dark brown, and popped it, looking optimistic, into his mouth. Ethan quickly did the same. They chewed, watching each other carefully. Then they both stared down at their plates.

“If only she had written down the recipe,” Mr. Feld said at last.

They ate in silence broken only by the clink of their forks, by the hum of the electric clock over the stove and by the steady liquid muttering of their old refrigerator. To Ethan it was like the tedious soundtrack of their lives. He and his father lived in this little house, alone; his father working sixteen hours a day and more perfecting the Zeppelina, the personal family dirigible that was someday going to revolutionise transportation, while Ethan tried not to disturb him, not to disturb anyone, not to disturb the world. Entire days went by without either of them exchanging more than a few words. They had few friends on the island. Nobody came to visit, and they received no invitations. And then, on Saturday mornings, this wordless attempt to maintain a tradition whose purpose, whose point, and whose animating spirit – Ethan’s mother – seemed to be lost forever.

After a few minutes the humming of the clock began to drive Ethan out of his mind. The silence lay upon him like a dense pile of flannel cakes, gummed with syrup. He pushed back in his chair and sprang to his feet.

“Dad?” Ethan said, when they were most of the way through the ordeal. “Hey, Dad?”

His father was half dozing, chewing and chewing on a mouthful of pancakes with one eye shut. His thick black hair stood up in wild coils from his head, and his eyelids were purple with lack of sleep.

Mr. Feld sat up, and took a long swallow of coffee. He winced. He disliked the taste of the coffee he brewed almost as much as he hated his pancakes.

“What, son?” he said.

“Do you think I would ever make a good catcher?”

Mr. Feld stared at him, wide awake now, unable to conceal his disbelief. “You mean… you mean a baseball catcher?”

“Like Buck Ewing.”

“Buck Ewing?” Mr. Feld said. “That’s going back a ways.” But he smiled. “Well, Ethan, I think it’s a very intriguing idea.”

“I was just sort of thinking… maybe it’s time for us—for me—to try something different.”

“You mean, like waffles?” Mr. Feld pushed his plate away, sticking out his tongue, and smoothed down his wild hair. “Come,” he said. “I think I may have an old catcher’s mitt, out in the workshop.”

THE PINK HOUSE on the hill had once belonged to a family named Okawa. They had dug clams, kept chickens, and raised strawberries on a good-sized patch that ran alongside the Clam Island Highway for nearly a quarter of a mile in the direction of Clam Centre. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Okawas were put onto a school bus with the three or four other Japanese families living on Clam Island at the time. They were taken to the mainland, to a government internment camp outside of Spokane. The Okawa farm was sold to the Jungermans, who had neglected it. In the end it was the island itself, and not the Okawas – they never returned – that claimed the property. The strawberry patch was still there, badly overgrown, a thick black and green tangle of shadow and thorn in which, during the summer, you could sometimes catch, like a hidden gem, the glimpse of a bright strawberry.

When Ethan and his father had arrived on Clam Island, they had chosen this house, knowing nothing about its sad history, mostly because Ethan’s dad had been so taken with the glass and cinder-block hulk of the old Okawa Farm strawberry packing shed. It had wide, tall doors, a high ceiling of aluminium and glass, and ample space for all of Mr. Feld’s tools and equipment and for the various components of his airships, not to mention his large collection of cardboard boxes.

“It’s got to be in one of these,” said Mr. Feld. “I know I would never have thrown it away.”

Ethan stood beside his father, watching him root around in a box that had long ago held twelve bottles of Gilbey’s gin. It was not one of the boxes left over from their move to Clam Island, which were all stamped MAYFLOWER, with a picture of the Pilgrims’ ship. There were plenty of those still standing around, in stacks, up at the house, corners crisp, sealed with neat strips of tape. Ethan tried never to notice them. They reminded him, painfully, of how excited he had been at the time of the move; how glad to be leaving Colorado Springs, even though it meant leaving his mother behind forever. He had been charmed, at first, by the sight of the little pink house, and it was enchanting to imagine the marvellous blimp that was going to be born in the hulking old packing shed. He and his father had rebuilt the shed almost entirely themselves, that first summer, with some occasional help from Jennifer T.’s father, Albert. For a while the change of light, and the feeling of activity, of real work to be accomplished, had given Ethan reason to believe that everything was going to be all right again.

It was Albert Rideout who had told Ethan, one afternoon, about the Okawas. The son, Albert said, had been one of the best shortstops in the history of Clam Island, graceful and tall, surefooted and quick-handed. To improve his balance he would run up and down the narrow lanes between the rows of strawberry plants, as fast as he could, without crushing a single red berry or stepping on a single green shoot. After the Okawas were interned, the son was so eager to prove how loyal he and his family were to the United States that he had enlisted in the Army. He was killed, fighting against Germany, in France. It was just a story Albert Rideout was telling, as they put a final coat of paint of the cement floor of the workshop, punctuating it with his dry little laugh that was almost a cough. But from that moment on, especially when Ethan looked out at the ruins of the strawberry patch, the sky over the old Okawa Farm had seemed to hang lower, heavier, and greyer than it had on their arrival. That was when the silence had begun to gather and thicken in the house.

“It’s really a softball mitt,” Mr. Feld was saying. “I played a little catcher in college, on an intramural team… hello!” From the box he was digging around in, he had already pulled the eyepiece of a microscope, a peanut can filled with Canadian coins, and a small cellophane packet full of flaky grey dust and bearing the alarming label SHAVED FISH. Like the others in the workshop, this box was tattered and dented, and had been taped and retaped many times. Sometimes Mr. Feld said that these boxes contained his entire life up to the time of his marriage; other times he said it was all a lot of junk. No matter how many times he went to rummage in them, Mr. Feld never seemed to find exactly what he was looking for, and everything that he did find seemed to surprise him. Now, for the first time that Ethan could remember, he had managed to retrieve what he sought.

“Wow,” he said, gazing down at his old mitt with a tender expression. “The old pie plate.”

It was bigger than any catcher’s mitt that Ethan had ever seen before, thicker and more padded, even bulbous, a rich dark colour like the Irish beer his father drank sometimes on a rainy winter afternoon. Partly folded in on itself along the pocket, it reminded Ethan of nothing so much as a tiny, overstuffed leather armchair.

“Here you go, son,” Mr. Feld said.

As Ethan took the mitt from his father, it fell open in his outspread hands, and a baseball rolled out; and the air was suddenly filled with an odour, half salt and half wildflower, that reminded Ethan at once of the air in the Summerlands. Ethan caught the ball before it hit the ground, and stuffed into the flap pocket of his shorts.

“Try it on,” Mr. Feld said.

Ethan placed his hand into the mitt. It was clammy inside, but in a pleasant way, like the feel of cool mud between the toes on a hot summer day. Whenever Ethan put on his own glove, there was always a momentary struggle with the finger holes. His third finger would end up jammed in alongside his pinky, or his index finger would protrude painfully out the opening at the back. But when he put on his father’s old catcher’s mitt, his fingers slid into the proper slots without any trouble at all. Ethan raised his left hand and gave the mitt a few exploratory flexes, pinching his fingers towards his thumb. It was heavy, much heavier than his fielder’s glove, but somehow balanced, weighing no more on one part of his hand than on any other. Ethan felt a shiver run through him, like the one that had come over him when he had first seen Cinquefoil and the rest of the wild Boar Tooth mob of ferishers.

“How does it feel?” said Mr. Feld.

“Good,” Ethan said. “I think it feels good.”

“When we get to the field, I’ll have a talk with Mr. Olafssen, about having you start practising with the pitchers next week. In the meantime, you and I could start working on your skills a little bit. I’m sure Jennifer T. would be willing to help you, too. We can work on your crouch, start having you throw from your knees a little bit, and—” Mr. Feld stopped, and his face turned red. It was a long speech, for him, and he seemed to worry that maybe he was getting a little carried away. He patted down the tangled yarn basket of his hair. “That is, I mean—if you’d like to.”

“Sure, Dad,” Ethan said. “I really think I would.”

For the first time that Ethan could remember in what felt to him like years, Mr. Feld grinned, one of his old, enormous grins, revealing the lower incisor that was chipped from some long-ago collision at home plate.

“Great!” he said.

Ethan looked at his watch. A series of numbers was pulsing across the liquid crystal display. He must have accidentally pushed one of the mysterious buttons. He held it out to show his father, who frowned at the screen.

“It’s your heart rate,” Mr. Feld said, pushing a few of the buttons under the display. “Seems slightly elevated. Ah. Hmm. Nearly eleven. We’d better get going.”

“The game’s not until twelve-thirty,” Ethan reminded him.

“I know it,” Mr. Feld said. “But I thought we could take Victoria Jean.”

ONE WINTER MORNING about three months after the death of his wife, Mr. Feld had informed Ethan that he was quitting his job at Aileron Aeronautics, selling their house in a suburb of Colorado Springs, and moving them to an island in Puget Sound, so that he could build the airship of his dreams. He had been dreaming of airships all his life, in a way – studying them, admiring them, learning their checkered history. Airships were one of his many hobbies. But after his wife’s death he had actually dreamed of them. It was the same dream every night. Dr. Feld, smiling, her hair tied back in a cheery plaid band that matched her summer dress, stood in a green, sunny square of grass, waving to him. Although in his dream Mr. Feld could see his wife and her happy smile very plainly, she was also somehow very far away. Huge mountains and great forests lay between them. So he built an airship – assembled it quickly and easily out of the simplest of materials, inflated its trim silver envelope with the merest touch of a button – and flew north. As he rose gently into the sky, the mountains dwindled until they were a flat brown stain beneath him, and the forests became blots of pale green ink. He was flying over a map, now, an ever-shrinking AAA map of the western United States, towards a tidy, trim bit of tan in the shape of a running boar, surrounded by blue. At the westernmost tip of this little island, in a patch of green, stood his smiling, beautiful wife, waving. It was Ethan who had eventually gone to the atlas and located Clam Island. Less than a month later, the big Mayflower van full of boxes pulled into the drive between the pink house and the ruined strawberry packing shed. Since then the shining little Victoria Jean, Mr. Feld’s prototype Zeppelina, had become a familiar sight over the island, puttering her lazy way across the sky. Her creamy-white fibreglass gondola, about the size and shape of a small cabin cruiser, could fit easily in the average garage. Her long, slender envelope of silvery picofibre composite mesh could be inflated at the touch of a button, and fully deflated in ten minutes. When all the gas was out of it you could stuff the envelope like a sleeping bag into an ordinary lawn-and-leaf trash bag. The tough, flexible, strong picofibre envelope was Mr. Feld’s pride. He held seventeen U.S. patents on the envelope technology alone.

Mr. Arch Brody had arrived early at Ian “Jock” MacDougal Regional Ball Field to see to the condition of the turf, and he was the first person to hear the whuffle and hum of the Zeppelina’s small motor, a heavily modified Mitsubishi boat engine. He stood up – he had been dusting the pitcher’s rubber with his little whisk broom – and frowned at the sky. Sure enough, here came that Feld – no more or less of a fool than most off-islanders, though that wasn’t saying much – in his floating flivver. As the ship drew nearer, at a fairly good clip, Mr. Arch Brody could see that the gondola’s convertible top was down, and that the Feld boy was riding beside his father. They were headed directly towards the Tooth. Mr. Brody was not a smiling man, but he could not help himself. He had seen Mr. Feld tooling around over the island many times, making test flights in his blimp. It had never occurred to him that the crazy thing could actually be used to get someplace.

“I’ll be darned,” said Perry Olafssen, coming up behind Mr. Brody. The players and their parents had started to arrive for today’s game between the Ruth’s Fluff ‘n’ Fold Roosters and the Dick Helsing Realty Reds. The boys dropped their equipment bags and ran to the outfield to watch the Victoria Jean make her approach.

“I don’t know if I’d want to be flitting around in that thing today,” Mr. Brody said, resuming his usual gloom. “Not with this sky.”

It was true. The hundred-year spell of perfect summer weather that had made the Tooth so beloved and useful to the islanders, seemed, to the astonishment of everyone, to have mysteriously been broken. If anything the clouds were thicker over Summerland than over the rest of the island, as if years of storms were venting their pent-up resentment on the spot that had eluded them for so long. It had been raining, on and off, since yesterday, and while the rain had stopped for now, the sky hung low and threatening again. In fact Mr. Brody had arrived at Jock MacDougal that day prepared to execute a solemn duty which no Clam Island umpire, in living memory and beyond, had ever been obliged to perform: to call a baseball game on account of rain.

“I bet that thing’s what’s makin’ it rain,” said a voice behind them, muttering and dark. “God only knows what that shiny stuff on the balloon part is.”

Everyone turned. Mr. Brody felt his heart sink; he knew the voice well enough. Everyone on Clam Island did.

“That man’s been messing with our sky,” said Albert Rideout, sounding, as usual, absolutely sure of his latest ridiculous theory. He had turned up again two nights earlier, bound for someplace else, come from who knew where, with seven ugly stitches in his cheek.

“What do you know about it?” said Jennifer T. to her father. “Are you an aeronautical engineer who studied at M.I.T., like Mr. Feld? Maybe you’d like to explain to us about the Bernoulli principle?”

Albert glowered at her. His battered, pocked cheeks darkened, and he raised his hand as if to give his daughter a swat. Jennifer T. looked up at him without ducking or flinching or showing any emotion at all.

“I wish you would,” she said. “I’d get your butt thrown off this island once and for all. Deputy sheriff said you’re down to your last chance.”

Albert lowered his hand, slowly, and looked around at the other parents, who were watching him to see what he was going to do. They had an idea that he was probably not going to do anything, but with Albert Rideout, you never knew. The fresh scar on his face was testimony to that. They had known Albert since they were all children together, and some of them still remembered what a sweet and fearless boy he had once been, a tricky pitcher with a big, slow curveball, a party to every adventure, and still the best helper Mr. Brody had ever had around the drugstore. Mr. Brody had even cherished a hope that Albert might someday follow in his footsteps and go to pharmacy school. The thought nearly brought a tear to his eye, but he cried even more rarely than he smiled.

“I ain’t afraid of the deputy sheriff,” Albert said at last. “And I sure as hell ain’t afraid of you, you little brat.”

But Jennifer T. wasn’t listening to her father anymore. She had taken off at top speed across the field to catch hold of the mooring line as Mr. Feld tossed it down to the grasping, leaping hands of the children. Before anyone had any idea of what she was doing, or could have begun to try to stop her, she tugged herself up onto the rope, twisting the end of it around her right leg.

The Victoria Jean rolled slightly towards the ground on that side, then righted herself, thanks to her Feld Gyrotronic Pitch-Cancellation (patent pending). Going hand over hand, steadying herself with her right leg, Jennifer T. pulled herself quickly up to the gleaming chrome rail of the black gondola. Mr. Feld and Ethan took hold of her and dragged her aboard. They were both too amazed by her appearance to criticise her for being reckless, or even to say hello.

“Hey,” Ethan managed finally. “Your dad’s here?”

Jennifer T. ignored Ethan. She turned to Mr. Feld.

“Can I bring her in?” she asked him.

Mr. Feld looked down and saw Albert Rideout, red in the face, standing with his arms folded across his chest looking daggers at them. He turned to Jennifer T. and nodded, and stepped to one side. Jennifer T. took the wheel in both hands, as he had taught her to do.

“I was going to set her down by the picnic tables,” Dr. Feld said. “Jennifer T.?”

Jennifer T. didn’t answer him. She had brought the tail of Victoria Jean around, so that they were facing southeast, towards Seattle and the jagged dark jaw of the Cascade Mountains beyond. There was a funny look in her eye, one that Ethan had seen before, especially whenever her dad came around.

“Do we have to?” she said at last. “Couldn’t we just keep on going?”

IT WAS A weird game.

The rain came soon after play began, with the Roosters as the home team taking the field in a kind of stiff mist, not quite a drizzle. The Reds’ pitcher, Andy Dienstag, got into trouble early, loading the bases on three straight walks and then walking in a run. The Reds’ pitching seemed to get worse as the rain grew harder, and by the fifth inning, when they halted play, the score was 7–1 in favour of Mr. Olafssen’s Roosters. Then came a strange, tedious half hour during which they all sat around under their jackets and a couple of tarps fetched from the backs of people’s pickups, and waited to see what the weather and Mr. Arch Brody wanted to do. Mr. Olafssen still had not put Ethan in the game. For the first time this was not a source of relief to Ethan. He was not sure why. Mr. Olafssen had met Mr. Feld’s announcement that Ethan wanted to learn to play catcher with a thin smile and a promise to “kick the idea around a little”. And it was not as if this were the kind of long, slow, blazing green summer afternoon that, according to Peavine, baseball had been invented to help you understand. It was miserable, grey, and dank. But for some reason he wanted to play today.

“I have been accessing my historical database,” Thor said. He was sitting between Jennifer T. and Ethan, holding up the tarp over all of their heads. He had been holding it like that for twenty minutes, straight up in the air, without any sign that his arms were getting tired. Sometimes Ethan wondered if he really were an android. “The last reported precipitation at these coordinates was in 1822.”

“Is that so?” said Jennifer T.” And what does all this rain do to your big undersea volcano theory?”

“Huh,” said Thor.

“Maybe,” Jennifer T. suggested, “you’re experiencing the emotion we humans like to call ‘being full of it’.” She clambered out from under the tarp and stood up. “Shoot!” she said. “I want to play!”

But the rain went on, and on, and after a while the tiny spark of interest in the game that Ethan had felt kindle in him that morning, reading Peavine’s book, had all but been extinguished by the dampness of the day. He saw Mr. Brody check his watch, and puff out his cheeks, blowing a long disappointed breath. This was it; he was going to call the game. Do it, Ethan thought. Just get it over with.

Suddenly Jennifer T. turned and looked towards the canoe birch forest. “What was that?” she said.

“What was what?” Ethan said, though he heard it too. It sounded like whistling, like a whole bunch of people all whistling the same tune at once. It was far away and yet unmistakable, the tune lonely and sweet and eerie, like the passing of a distant ship way up the Sound. Jennifer T. and Ethan looked at each other, then at the other kids on the bench. They were all watching Mr. Brody as he poked a finger into the grass, measuring its wetness. Nobody but Jennifer T. and Ethan seemed to have heard the strange whistling. Jennifer T. sniffed the air.

“Hey,” she said. “I smell…” She stopped. She wasn’t sure what she had smelled, only a difference in the air.

“The wind,” said Albert Rideout. “Comin’ from the east now.”

Sure enough, the wind had turned, blowing in crisp and piney from over the eastern Sound, and carrying away with it, as it flowed over the field at Summerland, all the piled-up tangle of grey clouds. For the first time in days the sun reappeared, strong and warm. Curls of steam began to rise from the grass.