Waxwings Read online

  “Moss bad.”

  To get into the house, Tom needed to find his keys. To find his keys, he had to put his parcels down. He stood irresolute, halfway up the steps, willing the man to go away, but his visitor only stared patiently back at him. “Thank you,” Tom said, in as terminal a tone as he could manage.

  “Need new roof.”

  A messenger from Beth? Surely not.

  “You want, I fix.”

  Daring himself to do it, Tom placed his two biggest parcels on the deck and reached for his keys.

  The man instantly gathered them into his arms. “Rain make wet. I hold for you.”

  At least he was still standing there, not running for his pickup, and Tom had the paperweight, but the man had the dog and the magic set as hostages. He grinned, exposing snaggle teeth, their enamel tinged with green. The street was empty. There was no one to call to for help. Tom had to go through the usual performance with his keys, shuffling through the English ones before he reached the American.

  “That one, he good,” the man said, and—most disquietingly—he was right. Carrying the parcels, he followed Tom through the door, where he immediately spotted Beth’s busted bike leaning against the wall. “Wah!” The explosive sound was a call of recognition, like someone shouting to a friend seen in a crowd.

  “Okay, take it away with you. I was meaning to drive it to the dump. Thanks.” Tom held the door open, but the intruder was on his knees now, feeling the twisted front fork of the bike with both hands. Even in his fury, Tom was reminded of how gently the vet had handled Hodge, their cat, after the accident, and of Finn snuffling beside her, his eyes aghast, saying “Poor Hodge” over and over again. He’d never before seen anyone show tenderness for a bicycle. When the man raised his head, there was a look of moral accusation in his pouchy eyes. “Can make good. I fix for you.”

  “I don’t want it. You can take—”

  “No problem,” the man said. He sounded insulted.

  It was preposterous: the fellow had wormed his way into the house like a sneak-thief, yet Tom felt called on to somehow make amends to him for his—for Beth’s—neglect of the bicycle. Against all reason, he found himself giving way.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Everett.”

  “No, I meant before that.”

  “Everett,” the man said in his hurt voice, wrong-footing Tom again.

  There were, of course, immigrant communities so self-contained that whole generations could grow up inside them learning little more English than this guy appeared to have at his disposal. But perhaps he was brain-damaged. If so, then his alarming prescience with the keys might bespeak an idiot savant. As a child in Ilford, Tom had known a certified lunatic who, given a date, any date, could tell you what day of the week it was. You’d say “January twenty-fourth, 1895,” and he’d say “Thursday.” He was never wrong, but he couldn’t go to the bathroom on his own.

  This bicycle-fixated idiot got to his feet and wiped his hands on his jacket, leaving smears of black oil on the virgin Gore-Tex. “Name is Chick,” he said. “I give you pager number.” He looked around the room with the entitled air of an invited guest. “Wah, books! You teacher?”

  “Well, yes, sort of.”

  “Hey! Maybe you teach me a thing or two, huh?” He cackled, and in his laughter Tom now heard an insufferable mockery. From one of his jacket’s many zippered compartments, he got out a pencil and notepad, on which he scribbled laboriously.

  When finished, he tore off the page and presented it to Tom, but Tom found far less than he’d expected, just “Chick” and a seven-digit phone number. Still, it looked like hate-mail. “Thanks,” he said, meaning “No thanks,” and stuffed it away in his trouser pocket along with the balled-up credit-card slips from his morning’s shopping.

  “You want quote, you call. Right?”

  “Quote?” Dazed, Tom thought, I told him he could have the fucking bike.

  “For roof, mister. New roof.”

  “You’re a—roofer?”

  “I got men,” Chick said in a new, lordly voice. “Mexican boys. Work like shit. I ride them herd. They do nice job, and fast, fast.”

  During the last ten minutes, Tom had seen Chick as a messenger of doom, a pest, a likely mugger, a figure of pathos, and now he tried to view him in an altogether more flattering light, as a contractor. The effort of doing this was very nearly beyond him, considering the ruinous pick-up, whose flat-bed held two gas canisters and a suicidal-looking stepladder. Yet better that, perhaps, than the new Range Rover with pigskin seats and double-decker ski-racks driven by the last contractor he’d tried to hire—or, rather, had been interviewed by, and rejected out of hand. In these times of raging plenty, beggars couldn’t be choosers when it came to contractors, and Tom was way down in the beggar class so far as contractors were concerned.

  “I give good bottom-line,” Chick said as if reading Tom’s mind.

  Tom wanted to believe, but Chick defied belief. He didn’t like Chick. He didn’t get Chick. Chick frightened him. But—and as buts go, it was a big one—Chick was volunteering to do the roof, and had Tom subscribed to the doctrine of preordination, he might have thought that Chick had somehow been sent.

  “I’d like to think it over.”

  Frowning gravely at the books on the shelves, Chick said, “Think too much, maybe I go some other guy’s house . . .” He picked up the injured bicycle and carried it out to the porch, where he went poking into the spongy patches of wood on the deck, letting out grunts and puffs of distress to signal his findings, as if each small outbreak of rot were a malignant tumor. Then he stood up, holding between his thumb and forefinger a fibrous splinter of black fir a few inches long and half an inch thick; rubbing the wood quite gently, he squished it to pulp.

  “You got insurinx, mister? Guy come up”—he pointed to the steps— “stand on wood and whoosh! he go down hole. Big-ticket item, right? Hey, maybe he die!”

  Tom thought of Olin the mailman, built like a manatee, a three-hundred-pound hulk in his crumpled Postal Service blues. From his office at the top of the house, he could hear Olin pounding the deck each morning, a great amiable reverberation, now to be anticipated with dread. He’d have to buy a mailbox and mount it on a post by the sidewalk . . .

  “I fix for you, no big deal.” He broke off a piece of sun-bleached green siding from the corner of the porch and held it out. “Time to make new!”

  You couldn’t go ripping the siding off people’s houses like that. “What do you think you’re—”

  “I show.” The contractor snapped the tile in two like a cracker, releasing a few grains of pale floating dust. “Asbestos,” he said in a whisper. “Illegal.”

  “Really? I’ve never heard—”

  “Real bad stuff. They hear you got asbestos, you get the city on your butt—”

  “Back. You get the city on your back, not your butt.”

  “See? What I say to you? You teacher!”

  Still cackling, he hoisted the bicycle aloft and bore it off to his truck. Before he climbed into the cab, he turned. “You have a good one, now!”

  But all good had drained from Tom’s day. Sadly, he hid the Christmas presents in the closet under the stairs. Sadly, he lunched off a can of lukewarm clam chowder and smoothed out the crumpled page with Chick’s name and number on it, fixing it with a magnet to the fridge door. Sadly, he found the receipt for the glass paperweight and stared at it with disbelief: the horrible sum at the bottom now looked like the price of a new porch.

  He made a pretence of picking up his book under the reading lamp, but the print made barely more sense than if it had been written in Chinese characters. He tried to conjure the willowy figure of Trollope’s Lily Dale, but saw instead the massive, inert body of Olin the mailman, fallen from the deck into the shadows of the basement and lying in an untidy nest of spilled mail. Drafty zephyrs stirred the strewn letters, lifting the pages of catalogues and magazines, rearranging the slithering piles of
introductory 0.0% credit card offers, supermarket coupons, Have You Seen Us? missing-children flyers, bills from AT&T and Puget Sound Energy, along with the rare handwritten envelope with a real stamp on it. The mail was alive; but from Olin—whose son was a second-string linebacker for the UW Huskies—came neither breath nor peep.

  At five, he picked up Finn from Treetops. As soon as he was buckled into his seat, Finn said: “Knock, knock!”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Lucy.”

  “Lucy who?”

  “Lucy Lastic makes your pants fall down!” In Finn’s manic screech of laughter, Tom heard Chick.

  “Groan! Oh, hellacious, ginormous groans galore!”

  “Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Sam and Janet.”

  “Sam and Janet who?”

  “Sam and Janet evening you will meet a stranger!” Finn guffawed, then said, “I don’t really get that one.”

  “It’s a famous song.” Tom sang it, in a fruity baritone. “Across a crowwwwwd-ed room . . .”

  “I still don’t get it. You don’t sing as good as my mom.”

  “So what are you, a music critic now?”

  “What’s a music critic?”

  Tom cooked pasta while Finn watched “The World’s Funniest Animals” on TV, then they played Pokémon, a game whose rules neither of them adequately understood, and Tom was glad to see his last hairless pastel-colored warrior creature destroyed by the venom powder of Finn’s Venomoth. At bedtime, Tom coasted through an episode of the current Mister Wicked story, but he could feel the narrative flagging as he spoke. Wind fluted in the eaves and crackled in the timbers of the roof. Even with his arm around Finn, and Mister Wicked up to no good on Lake Washington’s palatial eastern shore, Tom was dogged by the mocking figure of the contractor in his incongruous blue coat.

  He watched the eleven o’clock news on Channel 7. A man “of Middle Eastern appearance,” thought to be Algerian, had been arrested in Port Angeles when he tried to drive his rental car off the Victoria ferry. Inside the trunk, the spare-tire well was crammed with bags of urea, jars of nitroglycerine, and four black boxes, each containing a circuit board, a Casio digital watch, and a nine-volt battery connector. According to the female customs officer who’d stopped him, “His car looked too big for him, and he was kind of sweaty and agitated.” The man had a reservation for one night at the Best Western motor inn on Eighth Avenue in Seattle, and a ticket for a flight to London. “Reporting live from News Control,” a solemn reporter said that the FBI believed the man was involved in a plot to blow up the Space Needle. Taking down the Space Needle struck Tom as an eccentric and circuitous way of challenging the imperial might of the United States, but this was an easy country to misread: perhaps the conspirators had seen too many television reruns of Sleepless in Seattle.

  The KIRO people were high on their story of the swarthy foreigner, too small for his big American car. Tom saw in it a radio commentary about how aliens were figures as necessary as cowboys to the national mythology. In the great polyglot sprawl of America, people constantly needed to be reminded of their Americanness. The Treetops day began with small voices reciting the pledge of allegiance to the flag. One nation indivisible? Come again? The children had to say this each morning because it was such an entirely unlikely proposition—a profession of faith in a mystery that confounded the observable facts of the case. So America required strangers as proof of its own always-slippery existence.

  Canada—“our big dumb neighbor to the north,” as Beth liked to call it—helped. So did Hollywood extra-terrestrials, Mexican wetbacks, and industrious green-card seekers. But nothing made America feel more American than the arrival on the doorstep of a bona-fide Arab terrorist carting a bomb in the trunk of his rental brown Chrysler sedan. This guy—now safely under guard in the Clallam County jail—was a trophy alien, someone so satisfyingly other that everyone could feel a patriotic glow in the American-as-apple-pie Port Angeles officer who’d noticed his shaking hands, thick French accent, un-American size, and nailed him as the enemy.

  Writing idly in his head, Tom fell asleep in front of David Letterman.

  The next morning, driving home from Treetops, he was still at it, and eager to try the piece out on the keyboard. There was a rift of blue in the sky, shadows—faint, it was true, but definitely shadows—striped the pavement, and Tom had very nearly persuaded himself that Chick was a transient nightmare, mercifully banished by the sunlight. But the contractor was waiting on the porch steps, where he sat cradling Beth’s bike.

  He acknowledged Tom with a verdant but quickly curtailed grin. “Hey, how ya doin’?”

  The bicycle gave Tom a jolt. Yesterday it had been invisible to him, just part of the house’s fixed structure, to be stepped around without a second thought. Today—wiped clean, oiled, its chrome bits glittering in the pallid sunshine—it seemed to insist on its own presence, its self-important bicycleness. Tom saw Beth astride it; laughing, in high summer. The splintered basket was full of books. Beth’s fair hair was up but escaping in all directions from her tortoiseshell barrette. Skinny-legged, in tank top and jeans, she looked like a student. He hadn’t seen her laughing like that in years.

  “See? I fix. Is good like new.” Chick lifted the front of the bike and, with a grubby forefinger, set the once-frozen wheel in motion: it spun, and went on spinning, true as a gyroscope. “Now, you drive.” He thrust the bicycle at Tom, who took it cautiously by the handlebars as if it were a cat with a reputation.

  “Wait!” He produced an adjustable wrench from his jacket, which appeared to have aged badly over the last twenty-four hours; it looked slept-in, the blue Gore-Tex mottled with grease-stains. “Too little.” He wrestled with the saddle. “You big boy.” He wrestled some more, staring at Tom’s crotch from beneath the violet bags that overhung his eyes. “Wah!”

  There was no arguing with him. Shoulders hunched, scowling, gnomelike, he gestured impatiently at the street.

  Conscious of the pathetic figure he was cutting, Tom mounted the bike. He hadn’t ridden one since his first few days in Islington, when he’d been scared half out of his wits by speeding lorries on Liverpool Road, a quarter of a bloody century ago. Fearing a painful crash-landing, he put his weight on the pedal. He wobbled atrociously but stayed upright, more or less. There came back to him the unexpectedly familiar clocklike purr of bearings and sprockets. He pedalled up against the shallow gradient, his knees doing novel things as he strained to keep aloft and on the move. It was like people said: you didn’t forget. Head down now, grunting, he passed Galer, remembering in a rush the Sussex lanes where he and—what was her name?—Anne Wilshawe!—used to cycle out from Brighton to look at churches, then to smoke pot and snog each other silly in hayricks. He laughed aloud at the memory. Strange how those dark and frowsty churches, their air ripe with the scent of hassocks, Rentokil, mouldy hymn books, and bone dust, had turned them on . . . At eighteen, nineteen, the close proximity of the dead was an essential preliminary to going—nearly—all the way.

  He stopped, walked the bike across the street, and freewheeled back. Between the houses, fragmentary views of gray wind-frosted water and whitecapped mountains sailed past his right shoulder. Inhaling the salty breeze, Tom thought, I could get used to this. He braked, and clattered to a halt beside the contractor.

  “He go good now, right?”

  “Excellent!” Tom was thinking of Anne—no, no, Annette—Wilshawe, the dampness of hay, the twined braid of smoke rising from their shared joint.

  “Excellent!” The mynah-bird copy of his voice came back to him. “Excellent!” Chick fished out the notepad and pencil from his jacket. “You write down.”

  The page was full of English words and phrases, each written in a different hand, and, beside them, neat sprays of hieroglyphs in Korean, Chinese, or whatever language it was that they spoke in Everett. Tom read win-win, prioritize, dickhead, sweat equity, divvy up. He wrote excellent and handed
the pad back.

  The contractor stared at the word, frowning. “Eggs-kellent.”

  “No. Excellent. The c is silent.”

  Still looking dubious, Chick stowed his dictionary in his jacket.

  Tom got out his wallet. “What do I owe you?”

  Chick flapped his hand dismissively. “Nothing.” No ting!

  “Oh, no, that’s not fair—” He fingered a twenty. Two twenties, perhaps?

  “No ting!” His voice had taken on the insulted tone that Tom was coming to dread. “Fix for friendship only.”

  “Well, that’s awfully . . . kind of you, Chick.”

  The contractor, unappeased, wore a wounded scowl. “Now I make you quote for roof,” he said, and stomped off to the truck, where he made a sullen show of liberating his stepladder from the flat-bed, using the gas canisters as percussion instruments.