Waxwings Read online

  “Fically”? Tom checked the time of the message: 4:45 P.M. here, drunk o’clock there. Somebody ought to tell Scott-Rice to hold his pissed night thoughts in Drafts. His latest was all over the place—now belligerent, now whining, sometimes addressing Tom as a public institution, sometimes as a treacherous friend. He threatened legal action, wallowed in the miseries inflicted on him by the Inland Revenue, appealed to “our years of fighing a side by side in the tenches of Gub Street,” then he threatened legal action all over again. “I shall be consuting my lawyers in the morning.” Lawyers, in the plural?

  Although he was referred to in one sentence as a “rat,” Tom felt, on the whole, more sympathetic than not to Scott-Rice’s drift. Certainly, he was owed something—if not the promised month’s residency, then at least a decent fical compensation.

  Dear David,

  Can you let me have a shorter, more formal (and more temperate) version of this? I need something that I can show to the authorities, and I doubt if you’d want this to circulate around the U. So far as my rodentlike character will permit, I’ll do the best I can on your behalf.

  —Tom

  Chick’s current berth was an eight-by-eight storage container on Nickerson, rented ostensibly as a place to keep his tools. He thought the $75 a month extortionate, but the container had climate-control and a light socket from which he was able to run his growing collection of appliances. For a further $9.50, the storage company supplied him with a P.O. Box number and his own private mailbox.

  He was doing all right. As Charles Ong Lee, he had very nearly $9,000 on deposit at the United Savings & Loan Bank on Jackson Street, where most of the tellers spoke Chinese. American was his language now, but it felt safer to confront the mystery and seriousness of money in Chinese. After a careful discussion with the banker, he’d chosen to invest his money in money—in the currencies of all the nations, as hour by hour they rose and fell in relation to one another, forever changing in value. His money-market account made his dollars seem like living things, like horses jostling for position in a race. As the banker had explained it, his money would be continuously busy, working, always growing, making profits out of losses. The dollar drops— so you make more dollars with your yen. The yen drops, there’s the Deutschmark. Wolfing down a Big Mac, he took much comfort from the thought of his unwearying, industrious, ingenious money earning enough to pay for the burger in less time than he took to eat it.

  He kept his bank book safely buttoned into the homemade inside pocket of his jeans. At work, he’d feel its reassuring pressure, exactly where a girl might place her hand in a caress—another thought that made him smile. But for now, money was more exciting than any girl. He’d take care of that in time, when his money had made enough money for him to buy a good one.

  What Chick most needed now was Mexicans. He wasn’t asking for many. Even two would be enough. Whenever he saw Mexicans aboard a truck, he followed them, and twice had made a confident, grinning approach, only to meet with incomprehension and unfriendly stares. Lázaro was too scared of Mr. Don to help him look, but told him of a place downtown where Mexicans in search of work usually hung out. There was nobody there. Every construction site and house-remodel was using Mexicans, and the river had run dry. Chick felt cheated. He wasn’t greedy: two Mexicans only, and he’d be in the timber business, clearing maybe four hundred bucks a day. With no Mexicans, he’d be lucky to make $120, which over the last few weeks had come to seem dangerously close to chickenshit Mexican wages. Too small margin!

  Scarcity of labor was on Chick’s mind when he became aware of another overnight resident in the storage compound. An hour before dawn, his neighbor materialized into the lamplight: an older man, white, wearing a suit and necktie. His wrists were spindly, his stomach sagged, he walked like a duck. Chick thought, $7.00 an hour, as he sized him up from the shadows. Even this unhealthy-looking gweilo would be better than no help at all. Keeping out of sight, he tracked him around the block to a blue Dodge Neon—late-model, too. As soon as he was behind the wheel, the man thrust his jaw forward, blinked his eyes, and became a twenty-dollar man. Pulling away from the curb, he was like some bigshot sales-executive leaving his own gravel driveway after saying goodbye to a wife.

  Next morning, Chick showed himself. The man looked through him like he wasn’t there. Putting on the controlling smile he’d copied from Mr. Don, Chick took two steps forward. The man flinched, making an agitated, fluttering protest with his hands, then turned and hurried to the gate, exposing shoe-heels that had worn to bare half-moons on their off sides. Beyond the fence, he glanced quickly back through the chain-linking, and from his face you’d guess that evil spirits were after him.

  Watching the shamed man scuttle away in his beggar’s shoes, Chick felt pleasantly richer, like he’d just found a silver dollar in the street.

  Although Treetops had never been quite high enough to justify its name, it did start life on the third floor of a commercial building on Queen Anne that also housed a pizza restaurant, a gym, a travel agency, and a New Age book-and-crystal store. Two tenancies later, it had sunk into the basement of a Unitarian church, where the classrooms—Cypress, Sycamore, Space Needle, Olympic, and Skylight—no longer bore any relation to what could be seen from their windows, which let in so little natural light that the preschool had to be lit, all day and year-round, with power-thirsty 150-watt bulbs.

  Holding Finn’s hand as he walked down the steps into this subterranean world, Tom was a character in the books he’d pillaged to write The Few; he was Kenneth, on the run from Colditz, braving a strong-hold of the Waffen S.S. with forged ID and phrase-book German. At the entrance to Skylight, he kissed Finn goodbye, aware of Spencer staring at him from behind a tower of building blocks, and of Sally acknowledging his presence with a simper and a nervous little flap of her hand.

  “Have a great day, Finbow.”

  “Can you pick me up early? Please?” Finn’s face was wan; he, too, was in enemy territory.

  Tom hugged him tight. “Yes, after you’ve had lunch. If it’s a nice day, we’ll go to the zoo.”

  “Promise?”

  “Stick a needle in my eye.” He rumpled Finn’s hair and abandoned him to the Nazis.

  He still had to deal with the Oberführer in the office. Steeling himself against the interview—Beth had said it was essential to thank Midge for permitting Finn’s return—Tom pretended to interest himself in the notices on the cork-board: the fund-raising auction, the breast-cancer marathon, a bassinet for sale. To these messages, he found it uncomfortably easy to append another: the ghastly composite drawing, under a headline screaming WANTED in boldface 72-point type.

  When he appeared in the doorway, the principal speedily recycled a look of frank astonishment into something very like the colon-hyphen-and-parenthesis of her e-mail signature.

  “I just wanted to say thanks for—”

  “Well, we’re glad to do what we can. And you know we’re very fond of Finn. It’s just that . . .”

  “He did have some provocation. As I understand it, he was only trying to defend my good name.”

  “Spencer’s mom was most upset. Quite understandably.”

  The words And how do you think I fucking felt? sprang instantly to mind, though Tom managed not to voice them. Instead, he said, “I hope she recovers.”

  “We’ll all be keeping our fingers crossed for him,” she said, in a tone that didn’t even pretend to hold out much hope. “He’s a very . . . creative child.”

  He escaped the principal’s office, thinking that Beth would have handled this altogether differently. He reached the double fire-exit doors leading to the street at the same time as another departing father—one of several identically trim, close-cropped, boyish men whom Tom could never tell apart. He was already pushing on the panic-bar to swing the door outwards when the man—Scott, or Brad, or Todd—placed his hand immediately behind Tom’s and said, “You first.”

  Thinking this a clumsy acknowledgement of
his fifteen-year seniority, Tom ignored it and held the door open, waiting for the man to pass.

  “No, please.” The man then made a shoving, giddy-up ! gesture with his hands.

  Tom shrugged and walked up the steps. Not until he was crossing the street did he realize the insolent little bastard meant to see him safely off the premises. At the door of the VW, he turned in time to catch the guy brazenly staring from the top of the steps, a one-man neighborhood-crime-watch vigilante. Driving back to the house, riven between mortification and blind fury, Tom missed a YIELD sign and was indicted by a moss-green Range Rover with a needlessly loud horn.

  Chick was waiting for him. So were five pillars he must’ve yanked from the jaws of a tear-down—a timber baron’s mansion, circa. 1900, by the look of them. Oxidized paint clung to the timber in tarry, brownish dribbles.

  “How you like these guys? They good, huh?”

  Beside the slender gray columns that Chick had condemned as unsound, they seemed monstrous. Cut down to fit the porch, they’d be as comically obese as five sumo wrestlers squatting in line.

  Chick stroked a swollen wooden belly. “No rot! I fix him up, he be like new. I tell you, you not know your house when I done finish!”

  Tom was sure that he had first found the pillars, then made up the story of the rot, but knowing was one thing, and arguing quite another.

  “Cheap,” Chick said. “I get for you at bargain rate.”

  “How much?”

  “For all together, I pay”—he eyed Tom closely—“One hundred fifteen dollars.”

  Tom had expected a thousand or more. The figure was meaningless, really, for Chick would make his killing in labor costs, and the pillars were obviously stolen. Tom had never wanted them in the first place, yet here he was nodding his approval, smiling weakly with relief, agreeing that the damned things were spectacular value for the money.

  “Your lucky day, right?” Chick laughed.

  The front door had to be left open, to allow him to run the extension cords for his tools inside. The house filled with the sounds of the radio, the chain-saw, the sander, and with the resinous stench of fir. Sawdust drifted through the door and got tracked upstairs to the bathroom. The contractor could be seen in blurred outline, working in the eye of a small, sulfur-yellow tornado. Soon after eleven in the morning, it began to rain, and the dust that had settled thickly over the front yard turned to the color and texture of dirty clotted cream.

  When Tom left the house, he barely recognized Chick behind his flaxen eyebrows and moustache. His rimed cheekbones made his eyes appear to be sunken even deeper than usual into his skull.

  He turned off the sander. “Hey, I show you something.”

  Two of the gray columns had been removed from the porch. He propped one of them against the edge of the deck, then took a hammer, raised it above his head, and brought it down hard. The column snapped in two like an Italian breadstick, releasing a puff of white dust from the fracture.

  “Rot. You think I shitting you.”

  Tom then braved the Skylight Room for the second time. Hurriedly bundling Finn into his coat, he tried to pass himself off as an average standard-issue dad whose composite picture had never been shown on TV or published in the newspapers. As they were leaving, Sally came over to murmur confidentially that Finn had had “a good day,” which Tom took to mean that for once he’d failed to inflict grievous bodily harm on another child.

  It was too wet for the zoo, so they settled instead for life-size papier-mâché dinosaurs at the Pacific Science Center, which was blessedly empty on this weekday afternoon. The few people who were there paid Tom no special attention, so far as he could observe: outside his immediate neighborhood, it seemed, he was becoming safely anonymous again.

  Hayley’s disappearance had ceased to be a news item. The blunt truth, Tom supposed, was that the Topolskis weren’t sufficiently rich or photogenic to hold the wandering eye of the media for long. Had Hayley come from a lakeside mansion—had she been a JonBenet Ramsey— things would have been different, but a kid going missing from a rental bungalow in trailer-park country was a story without legs, and it had been quickly submerged under the pile of newer stories: the Greenlake rapist, the Laurelhurst axeman, the Tacoma gang killings, the cop who shot and killed a black motorist for no apparently good reason, the Sonics streaker, and the crash of Flight 261. And as Hayley Topolski slipped from public view, so did Tom Janeway. It had been ten days since he’d heard from Nagel, and he wondered if the detective, too, had wearied of the girl and moved on to a new case.

  Finn was at the controls of a robotic T-rex. Blank-faced, lower lip thrust forward, he made the creature swing its huge head up toward the rafters and give vent to a dolorous, sobbing roar. Tom, sitting on the bench in the center of the gallery, put on a show of clownish terror, but Finn ignored him. The dinosaur sank back, then turned its head inquiringly at him, and roared again. This time Tom stared into the small dim-witted eyes without a smile, trying not to blink. For the longest time—a minute at least—the tyrannosaurus remained stock-still, until Finn jiggled a button and released his father from its wounded, prosecutorial gaze.

  Bangers and mash—Finn’s favorite supper—were on the kitchen table when Chick appeared at the back door with an expression of such sly self-satisfaction that Tom prepared himself for catastrophic news. Rivulets of dusty rain trickled from the creases of his disreputable blue coat, and his eyes went on a methodical reconnaissance of the food on the plates and the stove.

  “Have you eaten yet?”

  “Won’t say no. Hey, kid—you wanna see something?” He reached into one of the many compartments of his coat and brought out a squirming bundle wrapped in a filthy towel.

  “It’s a puppy! Dad, it’s a puppy! Can I pet him?”

  “Sure,” Chick said, and let the animal loose on the floor.

  Finn was down on his hands and knees. “Doggie? Doggie, doggie, doggie? Oh, he’s so cute! Dad, look!”

  The thing was buff-colored, stoutly built, with vestigial legs and protruberant thyroidal eyes. A dachsund and a pug must have figured somewhere in its troubled ancestry, but other forebears came to Tom’s mind, including the tree frog, the brown rat, and the pot-bellied pig. “What exactly is it?” he said.

  “Is a dog,” Chick said authoritatively. He picked it up, lifted its tail, and pointed its rear end at Tom. “Girl dog.” He returned it to the floor, where Finn resumed his doggie-doggie-doggie talk in high-pitched singsong.

  “Got a name. Sugar.” He turned to Tom. “Like in the movie.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Like the movie.” Chick wiggled his hips about and mimed strumming a ukulele.“Sugar.”

  “Oh—Some Like It Hot.”

  “Yeah, the movie.”

  “Shooo-gar?” Finn said in his doggie voice. “Shooo-gar!”

  At the stove, with his back turned, Tom shoveled sausages and potatoes on to a third plate, furious at being blindsided. “Finn, put Chick’s dog down, wash your hands, and come and eat your supper.” The sausages bounced from the impact when he set the contractor’s plate in front of him.

  “Is Sugar your doggie?”

  “Your doggie now, kid.”

  “Mine? She’s mine?” Finn’s face fell apart from the inside outwards, eyes welling, mouth shifting shape, asymmetrically, like a red moon jellyfish. First he flung himself at the contractor, then at the puppy. “Sugar! Oh, Sugar! You’re my dog! Daddy!”

  “Well, isn’t that kind of him. Chick—how much do I owe you?” He saw Chick’s face assume the insulted look that he feared most, and immediately backed down. “Thanks. He’s always wanted a dog . . .”

  “I’ve always, always wanted a dog! Sugar! How big will Sugar grow?”

  Chick extended his hand to terrier-height and slowly raised it until it would have sat comfortably on the head of a mature Irish wolfhound. “So big,” he said.

  “I don’t suppose it came with anything like a . . . collar, or a leash?�
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  “Buy at store,” Chick said shortly, pronging his second sausage.

  “Do wash your hands, Finn, your food’s getting cold. You can play with it later.”

  “She’s called Sugar.”

  “You can play with her later.”

  The puppy went sniffing, in small, purposeful circles, around the perimeter of the kitchen floor, then stopped abruptly, faced its audience, and went into a crouch, head craning upward, ass thrust out. Its brow wrinkled into furrows, and its pop-eyes looked as if they were about to take leave of their sockets. Its hindquarters began to shudder. No one spoke. It was a tragic performance: Isolde, played by an overstrung amateur, Tom thought, singing her death-aria, the Liebestod. Finally, the puppy reached the Ertrinken versinken unbewusst, höchste Lust! bit, and stepped aside, leaving behind a surprisingly large, perfectly formed coil of excrement, like a gleaming fossil ammonite, on the white linoleum.

  “Good doggie!” Finn said, and held out one of his sausages.