Waxwings

by Unknown

  A short distance ahead, the street converged with the waterfront on one side and the line of the great aerial highway on the other. The ragged villagers were scattered under the arches of the highway, where they leaned against the pillars, talking, smoking cigarettes, and scratching at their sores.

  He was going to have to speak to them. He knew English. He’d studied it one year in school and learned the characters, or most of them. He’d chanted, in chorus, “This is Mister Brown. He is reading a newspaper and smoking his pipe,” and, “The power of the river creates electricity for the people of the town.” More to the point, he’d picked up a lot of English from the videos. He knew the word he needed now, and mumbled it several times, to make sure of its pronounciation.

  If something went wrong, he had an escape route marked out in his head: over the metal barrier, through the first rank of parked cars, across the narrow street, up the steps, into the street above, where he could lose any pursuers in the traffic. He was quick, like Chen Yang, ball at his feet, tearing through the line of Shanghai defenders. He could lose anyone in traffic, and nearly all the villagers looked old and sick.

  Staying close to the barrier, ready to leap it at the first sign of trouble, he approached, watching them closely, but no one looked up to catch his eye. They had bad skin—so bad, some of them, that he wondered if they were lepers.

  He chose a man with a pigtail of gray hair who was propped against the far end of the barrier, an old man, too slow and heavy to be a danger to him. “Please!” he said, his first American word. “Chinatown?”

  “What?”

  “China—town!” Surely he had it right? The snakeheads always said “Chinatown.”

  After a long vague moment, the man began to gabble and point. He smelled of alcohol and curdled milk. Though it was impossible to follow what he was saying, his hand gestured uphill and through the streets.

  “Hey! Man, thank you.” He was back in the video now, on the move, dodging and weaving through the many-chambered honeycomb of the city.

  It didn’t take him long to find the chilly grid of almost-empty streets, smelling of aniseed and cinnamon, where the Chinese restaurants were. First terror, then excitement, had numbed the tormenting hunger in his gut; now he was dizzied by the sudden ferocity of the pain. His stomach was hemorrhaging for want of food. Not caring who saw him, he tore through the garbage in an overflowing trash-can, and at last came up with a paper carton nearly full of orange-stained rice. He shoveled it down, both hands packing the cold gluey stuff into his mouth. Burrowing deeper, he found a half-eaten chicken leg, part of a hamburger bun, a 7-Up can with a mouthful of soda still left in it, a crescent-moon of a burger that had once gone with the bun, some flakes of fish adhering to a brown paper bag, a mess of bean shoots, and a barbecued spare rib.

  Grunting for breath between swallows, he wept as he ate. He carried the spare rib across the street to a small park with a painted toy pagoda and a drinking fountain. Hunched over the fountain, he gobbled furiously at the slender trickle of icy water that welled from the spout, so cold that it felt like a tendril of fire in his throat. Then he washed himself, rubbing hard at the dirt around his mouth and eyes. He picked up the spare rib from the edge of the fountain and sat on a stone bench, where he slowly gnawed the meat off the bone. Pigeons scuffled around his feet, and when he was finished, he threw the dry bone to the birds.

  The quiet alarmed him. It was like something bad had just happened here. Though it was deep into the morning now, the streets held only a few hurrying, solitary figures. The signs in the restaurant windows were strange, the cooking-smells were wrong. Half the store-fronts were empty—cleaned bare of everything except a bleached poster for an old Jet Li movie, fallen thumbtacks, dust, dead flies. He passed a grocery as poor-looking as any in Fuzhou. On a corner, he spotted two men talking; from a distance, it sounded as if they were speaking Cantonese, but drawing closer, he couldn’t make out a single intelligible word.

  Up an alleyway, he found a pet shop—a long, low, narrow cavern lit only by an overhead bulb and the green glow of its bubbling aquariums. No one was inside except the owner, a wizened, slippered man who was shuffling from tank to tank, feeding his fish.

  He felt safe in this dark place. Pretending to study a school of guppies, he spoke to the owner without turning his head.

  I have a message for my uncle. He works in a restaurant here. He is from Nanping, in Fujian.

  You had better ask them at Restaurant Hoi Sun. Everyone there is from Fujian.

  He had to listen hard to understand what the old man was saying. His voice was quavery, and the words were twisted out of shape, like echoes in a tunnel.

  Now I remember. Hoi Sun. He works there. Thank you. He tapped on the aquarium, causing a small explosion of fright among the guppies. You have some pretty fish.

  He had passed the Hoi Sun just a few minutes before. He returned there now, and tried the door. Locked. But the restaurant backed on to an alley, where a cook in a sauce-and-blood-splashed apron was tipping food into a garbage can. It looked like good food, too. He marked the can for later, made his apologies, and asked the cook if his imaginary uncle, Kai Chao from Lianjiang, was a waiter in the restaurant. The cook replied in Fujianese: no one by that name worked at Hoi Sun, but there was a restaurant in Tacoma where the family came from Lianjiang. Digging behind his apron into a trouser pocket, he came up with a packet of American cigarettes.

  You smoke?

  He hated to smoke—it spoiled the wind—but accepted a cigarette. Cupping his hands around the flame of the cook’s lighter, he dipped his head and sucked gingerly at the filter-tip. The toxic smell of lighter-fluid masked the faint herbal odor of the tobacco.

  Health regulations! The cook laughed. Usually, he said, he smoked inside, but when Madame Han was in the kitchen . . . He nodded over his shoulder. Wah! You’d better watch out, then!

  He tried to contain the smoke in the front of his mouth, puffing it out between pursed lips as fast as seemed consistent with good manners. In the cold, dead air of the alley, the smoke from the two cigarettes lingered around the men’s heads in an acrid mist that reminded him of the early days in the container before the smokers ran out of their supplies.

  The cook was friendly, but he was a rude, incautious man. He asked personal questions—Where from in Fujian? How long in U.S.? Where living now? He deflected each question with a polite obliquity and, head bowed, patiently worked the conversation round to a question of his own: suppose someone were interested in a position—a lowly position, like washing dishes—at Hoi Sun, to whom would this person need to speak?

  The cook dragged deeply on his cigarette and consulted the mottled gray sky. That, he said, would be a matter for Mr. Han.

  Where was Mr. Han?

  Not here. Later, perhaps. One could never tell with Mr. Han.

  The cook, and the alley, swirled abruptly into soft-focus, and he had to lean against the wall to stay upright. First he thought it was the smoke, then realized that his bowels were giving way.

  Toilet! Please? You show me the toilet?

  He sat, whimpering softly, in the windowless dark closet. It felt as though his whole being had turned to liquid and was discharging into the bowl in an unbroken stream, cascading out of him like scalding tea. He wouldn’t have believed that one starved body could contain such a burning flood of excrement. The diarrhea dribbled to a brief halt, then started to pour again, hissing as it hit the rising lake of shit in the bowl. He was afraid it would overflow onto the floor, imagined it seeping out under the door and pooling in the hallway. They’d see the puddle of filth, open the door, and find only a tangle of sodden clothes.

  Though it rose to the rim, it didn’t quite spill over. He had to flush the toilet four times to get rid of it, then, swaying on his feet, colliding with the walls, he cleaned himself up as best he could. When at last he got outside, the cook had gone. He leaned back against the brick, a papery shadow of himself, fearful that a gust of wind do
wn the alley might blow him clean away. Gasping for air, he closed his eyes and prepared to wait for Mr. Han.

  Waxwings

  3.

  Tom’s morning was getting wrecked by the whomp-whomp-whomp of helicopter rotor blades. He faced a hefty pile of student work, including an unexpectedly fine story, “Meredith,” by Hildy Blom, set in a trailer-park in eastern Washington. But the choppers dismembered her sentences almost as fast as he could read them, and he kept on going back to the first page to begin again. The upstairs study shuddered as the beastly machines—a whole fleet of them, by the sound of it—flew low over the house, the branches of the holly tree gesticulating crazily in the downdrafts from the rotors. This had been happening, on and off, for the last hour.

  He carried Hildy’s manuscript down to the scrubbed gloom of the kitchen, where he chewed long and hard on a fresh tablet of nicotine gum, then tried to switch off the mayhem in the sky and allow himself to be transported across the Cascades to the scorched desert plain of her story.

  Meredith was a suburban college girl from Mercer Island, but Hildy’s sympathies were with Meredith’s country cousins, who lived in a double-wide out in the dusty boondocks west of Spokane. The story was written from their point-of-view and took place one baking summer Sunday after service, at the Ritzville Church of God, as the stiff-suited cousins waited uncomfortably for Meredith to show up for lunch.

  It was a lovely subject. Hildy had created two distinct landscapes: one wet, green, and affluent; the other dry, brown, and poor. The cousins, staunch Christian Rightists, feared Meredith as the avatar of godless liberalism. They envied her, too, of course: for the SAT scores that were broadcast through the family via the jokey Christmas bulletin from Mercer Island deftly parodied in the story; for the white Jeep Wrangler that was her high-school graduation present; for her frictionless ease of passage between their world and hers. Yet come-uppance awaited her there in the trailer, where an overhead fan slowly stirred the suffocating air to no great purpose, and on top of the TV a plastic puzzle spelled out the name JESUS in silver blocks six inches high.

  It had its rough patches, and the opening wasn’t quite right, but “Meredith” was the first student story Tom had read in ages that would have excited him had he run across it in a magazine. Lank-haired, painfully shy, thickly bespectacled, Hildy Blom was a real writer—better by a long shot than David Scott-Rice, on whom she’d squandered her strangely merry laughter. If she could improve on the first two or three pages, Tom thought he’d try sending it, without telling her, to the New Yorker. With his known weakness for trailer parks, Bill Buford ought to be susceptible to this second-generation dirty realism. And if Buford actually bought it, Tom could use the credit due to himself as rain-maker: to get a student published in the New Yorker would be one in the eye for Lorraine Cole.

  The lazy revolution of the fan-blades in the trailer-home grew suddenly louder and more urgent, and metamorphosed into the unearthly racket of another bloody helicopter, which was immediately joined by the querulous pealing of the phone. Though he recognized his wife’s voice over the noise of thudding rotors, he couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying.

  “Sorry—we’ve got a helicopter gunship in the bedroom—I can’t hear you.”

  She yelled something about “murder.”

  “Beth! What did you say? Darling?” He crawled under the kitchen table and blocked his free ear as the helicopter passed directly overhead.

  Beth was saying that two men had been shot dead at a shipyard on Lake Union. “It’s all over the TV.”

  “Ah—that explains the plague of helicopters.”

  “I think you’d better pick Finn up.”

  “I’m a bit busy at present—marking. There’s a girl in my class from Spok—”

  “Tom: there’s a killer on the loose.”

  “Well, not here there isn’t. You said Wallingford—”

  “Tom—”

  “Well, of course if you’re really worried, I’ll go and get him now.”

  “Thank you,” she said, in a tone, Tom thought, of needless exasperation. “And call me when you get back home, will you?”

  He flicked the TV on with the remote. Sandwiched between the words BREAKING NEWS at the top of the screen and LIVE IN WALLINGFORD at the bottom, a woman was talking from behind her espresso stand.

  “. . . I used to not be afraid of anything. I feel like there’s nothing I can do about it—a little bit of powerlessness.”

  “Baristas” was another name for these coffee vendors, and in this city they’d displaced cab-drivers as the main source of instant public opinion. Whatever happened in Seattle, you always heard what the baristas had to say about it.

  “You can’t be inside and hide, you just have to be very careful of your surroundings.”

  The camera swung around to frame the reporter on the scene. “Dan, that’s what some of the folks in this quiet residential neighborhood are saying about the tragedy that’s happened here today. Reporting live from Wallingford, this is Michelle Terry.”

  Back in the studio, the news-anchor said: “Thank you, Michelle. We’ll be back with you in Wallingford momentarily.” He then did a recap. A man had walked into the shipyard office, shot two men dead, wounded two others—one critically—and had disappeared into what Dan the anchor called “the tree-lined streets of Wallingford.”

  Tom usually passed that shipyard on his way to the university—it was less than two miles from the house. Yet Wallingford was elsewhere; on the far side of the Ship Canal, over the Fremont Bridge, safely beyond the ken of Queen Anne Hill.

  Dan said: “Police describe the suspect as a light-skinned man, five-feet-ten to five-feet-eleven, in his late twenties or early thirties, with a moustache and a scruffy beard. Police say he was wearing sun-glasses, a dark cap, and a dark trench coat over camouflage clothing.”

  Up came an artist’s sketch of a generic Wanted Man that to Tom’s eye was identical to the ones issued for the Unabomber and Timothy McVeigh’s accomplice in Oklahoma City. By the time the police artists finished with them, their own mothers wouldn’t know them.

  Driving to pick up Finn, he switched on the car radio, and got another update from Wallingford.

  “And this just in: The police tell us that a man has been arrested near the Tacoma Dome. They stress that he is only a person of interest, and not a suspect, at this time, and that the gunman may still be at large.”

  If she glanced to her left, Beth could look down over the streets of actual Belltown even as she navigated virtual Belltown on the site.

  Belltown had always been a problem. Its text had been written and rewritten as often as the script of a Hollywood movie. Writers—moonlighting from the Stranger, the Weekly, the News Tribune, the Times, the P-I, the defunct Rocket—had come and gone, and still it wasn’t right. This was partly because actual Belltown was changing so fast that it had no settled character. Looking up the line of Second Avenue, what you mostly saw was scaffolding and beetling construction cranes. Even its name was a recent invention. In the nineteenth century, it had been Denny Hill, but during the civil megalomania brought on by the Alaskan gold rush, the hill was sluiced into Elliott Bay, and when Beth first came to the city, it was called the Denny Regrade. “Belltown” might well prove another temporary alias. NoVi—for North of Virginia—would suit it just as well.

  Restaurants down there opened and closed so quickly that by the time you got a reservation, the place had changed from French to Afghan. Sometimes, driving down Second, Beth had the impression that new condo blocks were built by the wrecking-balls of the demolition crews, so instantaneously did they spring into place. It was no wonder, really, that the neighborhood on the site never seemed to jibe with the physical venue visible from her cubicle window.

  She launched the console for the video-stream: the pictures were hopelessly out of date, but that, mercifully, was not her province. She left-clicked on the T-Bird to make a turn on Bell, checking the text as she went.
There was a spelling issue that needed to be settled site-wide. Dot-commers or—as here—dot-comers? She liked the latter, with its echo of “newcomers,” but it looked a little odd on the screen.

  For the second time that afternoon, she called home and got Finn.

  “What are you and Daddy doing now, pumpkin?”

  He paused to consider, then said, “I’m eating a cookie. And watching TV. Daddy’s reading a book.”

  She prayed that Tom would have the sense not to let him watch the coverage of the Wallingford shootings. If Tom had even registered them.

  “What are you watching?”

  “ ‘Scooby-Doo.’ ”

  “Can I have a word with your daddy?”