Waxwings Read online

  Waxwings

  Waxwings

  Waxwings

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Chapter 1.

  Chapter 2.

  Chapter 3.

  Chapter 4.

  Chapter 5.

  Chapter 6.

  Chapter 7.

  Chapter 8.

  About the Author

  ALSO BY JONATHAN RABAN

  Copyright Page

  Acclaim for Jonathan Raban’s WAXWINGS

  “Waxwings . . . is hugely satisfying; buzzing with life from Seattle’s dot-com industry, sharpened by domestic intrigue and then alarm as the protagonist’s life begins to fall apart.”

  —The Independent on Sunday

  “The best novel yet about the dot-com era. . . . Raban’s snapshots . . . are fall-over funny. [He] nails our short-lived intoxication and hints at the hangover to follow.” —Time Out New York

  “Raban’s pages . . . sing with dazzling phrases and fresh insights.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Sharper (and a lot faster) than The Bonfire of the Vanities, [Waxwings] may well be one of the best accounts ever written of an American era.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “It’s a testament to Raban’s control that he can integrate personal and public catastrophes so deftly in this witty novel. . . . He prods us to consider that we’re living in a period that makes us all somehow foreigners.” — The Christian Science Monitor

  “Raban’s views, ironic and humane, are always acute; always illuminating. His prose—agile, musky, particular—is a treasure.”

  —The Guardian (London)

  “Marvelous. . . . As with [Tom] Wolfe’s extravaganzas, Waxwings teems with juicy, funny characters emblematic of their time and place . . . but, unlike Wolfe, Raban knows how to bridge the gap between the broad social canvas of satire and the interior life of delicate, rounded characters.” — Entertainment Weekly

  “Waxwings has great amplitude and intelligence. . . . A wide-ranging, pungent, sharply observed novel.” —The News & Observer (Raleigh)

  “A delicious social comedy . . . Waxwings is also an elegant meditation on immigrant America.” —The Boston Globe

  “Generous, funny and beautifully written . . . Waxwings is extraordinarily rich and expertly paced and arranged. The social range of the novel is enormous; the characterizations acute. Every character, however incidental, has a voice.” —The Columbus Dispatch

  “Raban’s specialty is the sly, unsparing metaphor and jarring observation, and he’s at the top of his form in Waxwings. Yet he perceives his adopted homeland without American Beauty–style snarkiness or intellectual dispassion à la DeLillo, displaying instead the compassion and bracing honesty of an ambivalent lover.”

  —The Village Voice Literary Supplement

  “Waxwings stimulates the reader both emotionally and intellectually, gently tapping at the funny bone while giving us characters we care about. . . . It is a solid example of contemporary literature: entertainment with a message about modern society and the modern individual.” — South Florida Sun-Sentinel

  “Imagine Evelyn Waugh with a social conscience and, perhaps, a tad more humanity. . . . Enormously pleasing. . . . Wonderful fun, as lively as anything out there.” —The Hartford Courant

  Jonathan Raban

  WAXWINGS

  The author of ten previous books, Jonathan Raban was born in England and since 1990 has lived in Seattle. His honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heinemann Award of the Royal Society of Literature, the PEN/West Creative Nonfiction Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Award, and the Governor’s Award of the State of Washington.

  ALSO BY JONATHAN RABAN

  Soft City

  Arabia

  Old Glory

  Foreign Land

  Coasting

  For Love and Money

  God, Man, and Mrs. Thatcher

  Hunting Mister Heartbreak

  The Oxford Book of the Sea (editor)

  Bad Land

  Passage to Juneau

  FOR MY DAUGHTER,

  JULIA RABAN

  Waxwings

  1.

  “November,” the pilot said.

  Wave-crests were breaking gray on a sea as black as crêpe. Ragged nimbus clouds brushed the ship’s bridge. The lone spot of color was on the radar screen, where the coastline showed as a wide brushstroke of glowing copper.

  “Steady as she goes,” the pilot said. “Zero-seven-five.”

  “Zero-seven-five.” Compact, broad-bottomed, the captain was a dense blot of shadow at the wheel.

  They spoke quietly, as if they were in church. Eleven stories up from the water, the noise of the engines was a distant rumor. Though a westerly gale was blowing down Juan de Fuca Strait, it was inaudible on the bridge, for the ship had been built with hurricanes and typhoons in mind, and the bronchial churring of the air-conditioner drowned out whatever sounds were being made by the weather. The Pacific Auriga, 51,000 tons, bound for Seattle from Osaka and Hong Kong, was too big to notice the small sea on which it now found itself, its only apparent motion a slight mechanical vibration underfoot.

  “You’ve got the Dungeness light there, Cap,” the pilot said. “Starboard. Two o’clock.”

  “Yes, I’ve got it,” the captain said, a little shortly, for he was an old hand on this run, and the pilot new to him. Stepping aboard from the launch off Port Angeles, the pilot presented himself on the bridge with a cocky, affectless assurance to which the captain, a New Zealander, took an immediate dislike. Now the young American was fiddling with the radar closest to the wheel, officiously targeting echoes.

  “You can go to zero-eight-zero, Cap. The spit’s right on the two-mile ring. Tide’s making about three knots.”

  “We usually see Doug—Doug Nielsen?”

  “Captain Nielsen’s taking the week off. Family emergency.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Ahead of the bridge, lines of stacked containers stretched away into the darkness. The water puddled on their tops caught the light from the deck below the bridge and glistened like a wet highway, blinding the Captain to the sea beneath the ship.

  “Better slow her down to eleven, twelve knots—whatever’s comfortable,” the pilot said, voicing what the Captain had already decided. “We’re in no hurry. You’ll be dropping the hook for the night in Elliott Bay: they won’t berth you at Harbor Island till five at the earliest.”

  “Your cabin’s made up—the purser saw to it. David?” the Captain said to the lounging shadow of the Third Officer. “Could you rustle up a fresh pot of coffee? Coffee for you, Mr.——?”

  “Warren,” the pilot said, “Warren Kress,” speaking his name for the second time in fifteen minutes. “You have decaf ?”

  “We’re out of decaf,” the Third Officer said. “I can make you a cup of tea, if you want.”

  “My wife’s got me on decaf these days,” Kress said. “I’ll take a glass of water, though.” As he moved away from the radar, he unfolded himself, slowly, in sections, and stood as tall as a basketball player. From somewhere above the Captain’s head, he said, “Yeah, the funeral was today.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Captain Nielsen’s grandkid.”

  “Not the little girl? He was talking about her last time he was on board. She—died?”

  “Yeah, she got killed. Five years old. It was just a couple days after her birthday.”

  “Oh, Jesus. What was it—a car accident?”

  “A cougar.”

  The brand of car that ran her down? the Captain thought. Why does he have to say that?

  “A mountain lion,” the pilot said. “She was kil
led by a cougar.”

  “How?”

  “She was at her day-care. In Sequim. It’s a Montessori place in a new development out there, real close to the woods. Ashley—the kid— was playing by herself in the yard, a ways off from the others, and the cougar dragged her into the bushes. Teacher was in the bathroom— and I wouldn’t care to be in her shoes right now. The other kids say they never heard her yell or anything. She just disappeared. First they thought she’d wandered off, then that a child-molester must’ve abducted her. They were running around looking for a man, and it was half an hour before they found her. A clean kill—one bite severed the carotid artery. Her right arm was gone, torn right out of the socket. Port fifteen, Captain: zero-eight-zero.”

  The pilot, his voice level and dispassionate, sounded like a radio announcer reading from a bulletin.

  “They got the cat. The Fish and Wildlife guys treed and shot her about a mile away. They were lucky to find her, but the day-care’s toast: they were meant to have a chain-link fence around the yard, according to code, and the subcontractor fouled it up. They’d only been open since Labor Day. The family’s bringing suit.”

  To starboard, the low black hills inched slowly past, pin-pricked with tangerine lights. Sequim.

  “Everyone’s in shock. More’n a thousand people showed up for the funeral, so I heard.”

  “Poor bloody Doug,” the captain said.

  “Yeah, he’s taking it hard. He was on a Korean bulk carrier outbound from Tacoma when it happened, and they broke it to him when he came off in the launch. Captain Nielsen, he’s an older man—”

  No older than me, the captain thought.

  “—he lived for that kid, after his divorce. When he wasn’t at work, he spent all his time around at his son’s place, babysitting. It was kind of a joke with us, Doug and his babysitting.”

  “I didn’t know he was divorced.”

  “He never talked about it. Wife left him two, three years back, and went down to live in Santa Barbara. Or Santa Fe. Santa someplace. His son’s a realtor—got an office out on Highway 101. But now that Ashley has passed on—”

  Passed on? Hunched over the wheel, looking out into the dark, the Captain was picturing the animal, a tawny shape-shifter, padding soundlessly through damp leaf mulch, and the child, talking to herself, absorbed in her play. “Passing on” was not the phrase he would’ve chosen for what was going to happen next. Though he didn’t know Doug Nielsen well, he could feel his grief as a distinct hollow in his own gut, and didn’t at all care for the young pilot’s manner, in which there was a trace of something close, almost, to amusement.

  “Coffee’s up.” It was the Third Officer. The Captain took his mug from the tray with a distracted grunt. “We’re talking about Doug Nielsen,” he said.

  “Doug the pilot?”

  “He lost his little granddaughter. The funeral was today.”

  “It was an accident waiting to happen,” the pilot said. “When we logged the old-growth, we degraded that whole habitat. Now we’re into third-growth, and a third-growth plantation just doesn’t have the sustenance these critters need. By the end of summer, they’re starving, so they come into the cities to scavenge—you can’t blame them for doing what they need to survive. When you get cougars killing kids in school-yards, it’s a wake-up call.” He peered for a moment into the hooded radar. “It’s a wake-up call,” he repeated, rolling the phrase as if he’d just minted it.

  “That’s how she died?” the Third Officer said. “A cougar?”

  “And it’s not just out on the Peninsula—it’s happening right in Seattle. They’ve got cougars in Issaquah, garbage-bears in Woodinville. Around this time of year, the local news starts looking like ‘Animal Planet,’ with everybody shooting home videos of the wildlife in their yards. People used to get a thrill out of seeing a raccoon, but nowadays you’re talking bobcats, skunks, black bears . . . critters that ought to be out hunting in the mountains. Instead, they’re living out of trash-cans and Dumpsters in the ’burbs. You got the fairway buoy there, Cap.? There’s a whole new generation of animals that’s being raised on leftover pizza and burgers and fries.”

  The buoy was a cat’s-eye flash of yellow in the darkness. At half speed, lying low on its lines, heavy with cargo, the Pacific Auriga made a wide turn to starboard.

  “One-two-zero.”

  “One-two-zero.”

  As the ship slid southeastward into the gullet of Puget Sound, the Third Officer watched the radar painting echoes on the screen. He could put names to the echoes—Wilson, Marrowstone, Bush, Double Bluff—now that the ship was coming into familiar water. Familiar water, but queer land. Though he’d never given much attention to the perils of the sea, the Third Officer was horribly alert to the perils of the countryside. When he saw green fields, he instinctively thought of pawing bulls. A spell of shore leave at his sister’s house outside Brisbane had been turned into agony by a casual warning about spiders in the toilet.

  This had been a rough trip, dogged by small misfortunes of timing and weather, and he’d been looking forward to his layover in Seattle. But even though he meant to go no further from the ship than a ten-dollar cab ride (split with the Radio Officer), the thought of wild bears stalking the suburbs upset him greatly. To fight his phobia, he was forever telling himself that his fears were irrational—but that would cut no ice now, not in this city.

  “Take your urban coyotes—” the pilot said.

  Please, let’s don’t, the Third Officer thought.

  “They’re interbreeding with the domestic canids. Take a look at the dogs around here—at their jaws and the way they carry their tails. You’d be surprised by how many of them are half-coyote. You’re getting German shepherd–coyote mixes, lab–coyote mixes, collie–coyote mixes . . . and you wouldn’t want to meet these guys on a dark night, I’m telling you.”

  On the water, the copper-colored land mass was squeezing in around the ship. Bush Point nicked the one-and-a-half-mile ring, though its light failed to show in the thick weather. Gazing into the dark, the Third Officer populated the invisible coast with wild and vicious beasts and felt a pang of homesickness for the tame streets of Stoke-on-Trent, where his parents lived, and where, touch wood, he’d be back in time for Christmas. His mum and dad always expected stories from him—an expectation he could rarely satisfy. But now he had a story to tell them over the Christmas pud and brandy butter.

  In the house on Queen Anne Hill, the wind rattled the panes of the sash window in the bathroom where Finn was in the tub, decorating his upper lip and chin with gobs of fleecy foam.

  “Where’s Daddy?”

  “He’s out to dinner with a friend of his. From England.”

  “Ho, ho, ho!” Finn said in his deep Santa Claus voice.

  “He won’t be back till after you’re asleep,” Beth said from behind the green dinosaur towel she was sniffing, which smelled not unpleasantly of Finn, old soap, and chlorine from the public pool. It was Tom’s turn to do the laundry—as she’d remind him with a Post-it note on the fridge.

  “You know what?” In a movement that a yogi would have found hard to emulate, Finn lifted his right leg from the water and brought his foot close to his face for inspection.

  “What, pumpkin?”

  Squinting between his toes, he said, “I’ve been thinking.”

  “What have you been thinking?”

  “It’s a problem. Where would I be if I wasn’t here?”

  “You mean here in this house?”

  “No.” Finn studied his pink sole, frowning impatiently. “Where would I be if I wasn’t here?”

  “I don’t know.” Beth had been fighting a headache all afternoon, and a pile of work was waiting in her laptop downstairs. “Where would you be?”

  “I wouldn’t have a brain if I wasn’t here.” For a split second, Finn’s face looked as it did when a hamster or a gerbil died, crumpling inwards like a dynamited building, but this time it crumpled into a fit of the giggle
s. He sat in the tub, engrossed in some huge private joke, idly popping bubbles with his forefinger.

  Beth sat on the closed lid of the toilet and put on her largest, most reassuringly maternal smile. “Is this something you think about a lot, pumpkin?”

  “What?”

  “Like where you’d be if you weren’t here?”

  “Oh, I think about it all the time.” Finn went on popping bubbles. “My toenails are too long.”