Waxwings

by Unknown

  In the upstairs study, Tom pretended he was working. He typed on to the screen Like cowboys, or Pilgrim Fathers, aliens, and voided it with the Backspace key, listening to the scrape of his alien’s sneakers on the composition tiles overhead. He could hear him talking to himself in a soft and mournful-sounding warble, punctuated by sudden astonished exclamations. There was a tearing noise, and something—not a bird—went tumbling past the window into the yard. Alarmed, Tom went down to find out what was going on.

  Looking up, he saw Chick astride the roof-peak, notepad balanced on his knee, intently scribbling.

  “Everything okay up there?” Tom called.

  The contractor had the abstracted air of a poet in thrall to an imperious muse. For several seconds, he went on writing, then treated Tom to a long silent stare. Some fifty feet separated the two men, but Tom could’ve sworn there was a look of contemptuous pity in the pools of shadow that were Chick’s eyes.

  Half an hour later, Chick, ignoring the bell, was hammering on the front door. When he stepped inside, he placed his hand—too familiarly, Tom felt—on the seat of Beth’s bike and fondled it in a droit du seigneurish sort of way. He came quickly to the point. “Under roof, wood go all to shit. Must have new.”

  It was as Tom had feared—and as Beth had kept on saying. His whole house was rotten. In this wet and wooden city, houses were as ephemeral as sand-castles. They were washed away in mudslides, or collapsed back into the soil in a soggy mulch of decomposing Douglas fir. They needed to be looked after with the care of a mother for a chronically sick child—which explained why so many of Tom’s colleagues in the English department appeared to spend half their time in carpenters’ aprons, repairing, remodelling, trading elaborate tales of stuff they’d found in the Home Depot on Aurora. For years, he’d been in denial; now he was in for it.

  “Big trouble.” There was an infuriating note of satisfaction in the contractor’s voice. He handed Tom a folded sheet of paper, torn from his notepad. “I make quote.”

  Tom hardly dared to unfold it. His house was a tear-down. But the lot, at least, must be worth something. Frozen-faced with apprehension, he read what Chick had written:

  ROOF

  $4150 WORK AND MATERIEL INCLUDE

  CASH

  The number was a fraction of what a real contractor would charge; even he knew that much. “And the porch?” Tom heard himself say in a supplicant whisper.

  “I’ll make you a deal, mister,” Chick said in fluent American, as if his fractured language had all along been a pose. “For porch and roof ? Five grand, even.”

  At her work-station in the Klondike building, Beth opened her Drafts folder and, for the sixth time in two days, read through the letter she’d been writing to Tom. It wouldn’t do. In its present version, it all sounded far more complicated than it should; he was bound to take it the wrong way, jumping to stupid conclusions. What she needed to say must be plain, simple, factual, leaving no room for argument, doubt, or—worse—laughter. If she’d promised herself anything over the last few weeks, it was that never again would she expose herself to Tom’s shallow and destructive cynicism, to that curled Hungarian lip, that supercilious eyebrow with its white hairs crowding out the black. That snigger. She wasn’t going to let him get to her, not anymore.

  It angered her that Tom should still have the power to put her on her guard like this. Why did she have to be so fucking diplomatic? Indignation mounting, she scanned the draft on her screen:

  Hi Tom—

  Finn’s counselor [and make that “doctor,” for a start] has suggested that we put him on an oligoantigenic diet—chicken, fish, potatoes, rice, pasta, bananas, apples, and green vegetables. No-nos include chocolate, and any foods with synthetic dyes, like cupcakes, candies, colored breakfast cereals (no more Apple Jacks!), and striped toothpaste. Also to avoid: apricots, berries, tomatoes, milk, wheat and corn, and eggs (he doesn’t like them much anyway).

  He’s got a problem with yeast overgrowth—best treated with probiotics (good bacteria), like lactobacillus, which comes in live yogurt. (But make sure it’s live—commercial yogurts usually aren’t. Queen Anne Thriftway carries the live stuff, on the top shelf, above the Yoplaits, etc.)

  When Finn gets “hyper,” it’s because of an excess of free radicals in his system—unpaired molecules that tend to run amok if they’re not neutralized. I’m giving him blue-green algae capsules (one in the morning, one at night). Look for the bottle in his backpack.

  Sorry if this sounds a hassle, but the diet is the safe alternative to Ritalin. (I can tell you the horror stories . . . )

  —Beth

  She printed it out, then clicked on New Mail. Furious now at Tom for wasting her time and exhausting her patience, she typed:

  Tom: Finn’s doctor has put him on a diet, and we’re all counting on you to cooperate.

  A single terse graph of instructions followed. Not wanting to give herself a chance to weaken, she sent it immediately. He deserved it, didn’t he? For once, she’d stood up to him, leaving no clever loopholes for him to escape through. Watching the message leave her computer, Beth felt a just pride in her own temerity.

  Later, though, she fished the damned thing out of Sent Items, winced at its tone, and sent a note that began “Sorry, I was in a rush at work when . . .” And for making her write it, she hated him.

  Tom woke in pitch darkness to what sounded like the quarrelsome tail-end of a drunken party in his yard: men’s voices, shrilling at each other, and the noise of heavy falling objects. Bodies? The luminous LCD of the alarm said 07:00. With Finn at Beth’s, he’d planned to sleep in, but now groggily clambered into shirt and pants. The loudest of the voices outside belonged to Chick. “Más rápido! Move your ass, man!” he shouted, then, “Mierda!” This was quickly followed by the sound of something like a head-on car smash, which in turn was followed by a terrible low groan from below the bedroom window. After a moment or two of silence, there came derisive laughter.

  When Tom ventured on to the porch for the New York Times, he was met by his contractor, who gestured at the tumult of shadows behind him, and said, “Mexican boys,” as if that explained everything. Then he showed Tom his open palm. “Today, you give me one thousand dollar.”

  The demand, while fair enough, was voiced like a threat at gun-point.

  “I’ll need to go to the bank to draw—”

  “When bank open,” Chick said. It was not a question.

  As the darkness paled into a drizzly half-light, Tom saw that “boys” was entirely the wrong word to describe this gang of shambling men with tragic faces, beside whom Chick looked like a kid. In the dank chill of midwinter, the Mexicans went sockless in flappy plastic sandals, their feet black with mud. Their headquarters was a red pick-up truck, conspicuously newer and shinier than Chick’s rusted hulk; here they retired at intervals to smoke cigarettes and swig from a shared Thermos flask. There seemed to be a lot of them—a dozen at least, by Tom’s rough estimate, though when counting them up, he never got higher than five.

  During the course of the morning, and apparently of its own accord, there grew up one side of the house a perilous folly of driftwood logs, broomsticks, lengths of drainpipe, a boathook, some bamboo, the side of what had once been a ladder, two-by-fours, and a pole to which a 2 HOUR PARKING sign was still attached, its countless joints lashed with raffia. Seeing the man named Lázaro trust himself to this flimsy scaffolding, flitting from perch to perch like a budgerigar in a cage, Tom— who suffered from vertigo at the best of times—felt an ominous convulsion in his stomach and thought of Chick saying “insurinx.” Was he liable?

  The men took casual possession of the house, leaving their routes through it clearly posted in mud. When Tom went to the bathroom, he found the door open and a Mexican inside, shaking his prick dry over the toilet. Perfectly unabashed, the man greeted him with a wan, misshapen smile. At noon, in the kitchen, the whole crew assembled round the butcher-block table to gnaw at wings from Kentucky Fri
ed Chicken—the first fruits, Tom assumed, of the thousand dollars he’d given Chick in a wad of new fifties.

  Then the devastation started. They were up on the roof, armed with crowbars, slinging tiles and timber into the yard. The house shook to the din of pounding, rending, splintering, and the steady rain of falling wreckage. Above it all, Tom heard Chick goading his hapless “boys” more loudly than the howler monkeys in Woodland Park Zoo. How the Mexicans put up with this treatment was a mystery to Tom—he felt vicariously outraged on their behalf—but they appeared to accept Chick’s tyranny as a fact of American life, like its unkind weather.

  To escape the noise, he wheeled Beth’s bike outside and pedalled the hazardous three-quarter-mile to Ken’s Market—an adventure heightened by his near-death experience with a silver Nissan Pathfinder. On the return journey, he heard the house long before he saw it. Coasting downhill toward the racket of demolition, he spotted a rotund figure standing in the middle of the road, and recognised it as Suzanne Somebody, a not-so-close neighbor, in tight cherry-pink running gear, her hand cupped above her forehead as she gazed at Tom’s roof.

  He dismounted and began to apologize for the noise, but she broke in before the word “Sorry” had left his mouth.

  “How clever of you! Where did you find them? Did you have to spend an age on their waiting-list?”

  He searched her face for indications of malicious irony.

  “We’ve been looking for two years, but nowadays you can’t find anybody to do a thing.”

  Together, she and Tom stared upward at the marvel of men doing things. A baulk of rotten timber bounced off the porch guttering and exploded at the bottom of the steps. From his command post, wedged between the brick chimney and the slope of what was now left of the roof, Chick fired off a rapid volley of multilingual abuse. “Muttafukka!” was the only word Tom understood.

  “Lucky you,” the woman said. “If—when he has a spare moment— you could possibly put in a good word for me?”

  Tom felt a sudden rush of protectiveness toward his contractor. “Well, of course I’ll try. But I gather that he’s pretty much fully booked.” Then he added: “Through next year and well into 2001. So he was telling me.”

  “They always are.”

  “But I will ask,” Tom said. This was now the way of the world. No sooner did you find a contractor than some unscrupulous neighbor bribed him away in the dark of the night, leaving you with a wide-open hole for a roof. Beth had told enough sob-stories about flighty contractors that he knew they were prone to decamp at the first hint of a more profitable berth. To keep them faithful, you had to be always at the ready with sweet-talk and lies. This Suzanne was a grim reminder that he had to stay on Chick’s good side.

  All day, piles of rubbish had been rising around the house. They were now a good deal taller than Tom, and he had to scramble between them to gain access to the porch, from where he had a view of dark junk-mountains, dust rising like volcanic smoke in the thin drizzle. Chick was fast turning the place into Boffin’s Bower. Leaning on the porch rail, looking out over mounds already big enough, surely, to contain the ruins of an entire house, Tom saw himself for a happy moment as Nicodemus Boffin, magnate of dirt, the Golden Dustman, in black pea-coat and gaiters; “rather a cracked old cock,” as Silas Wegg observed of him.

  He was still smiling when he collected Finn from Treetops.

  “Did you eat your fruit at lunchtime, Finbow?”

  “Yep.”

  “What was it?”

  “Kiwi.”

  “You ate a whole kiwi?”

  “Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”

  Back at the house, the contractor’s men were draping tarps and pieces of plastic sheeting over the exposed rafters, with Chick holding a builders’ clip-on halogen light on an orange extension cord that disappeared into Tom’s open bedroom window.

  “Oh my God!” Finn’s whole face seemed to swell up and go out of focus.

  “Finbow, love, I’m so sorry. I should have told you. We’re getting a new roof.”

  As he hugged Finn’s shivering body tight, Tom heard a long gurgling sob, as if he was about to lose his lunch; and it took a little while to realize that Finn was quaking and heaving with laughter as he took in a view of chaos and destruction beyond even a four-year-old’s ambitious dreams of mayhem.

  “Holy shit!” he said admiringly.

  “Finn!”

  He spluttered out: “My mom says that all the time.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s so cool!”

  By lamplight, it was a scene from the Blitz; the rubbish piles forming the jagged rim of a bomb crater and the crazy scaffolding up the right side of the house resembling rooms torn open in the explosion. Down through the staging, monkeying from branch to branch, came Chick.

  “Hey, how ya doin’?” he said to Finn, dusting off his hands.

  “Good,” Finn said, gazing up at the great anarch with something close to worship, and setting an exploratory foot on the mounds.

  “Don’t!” Tom said. “Don’t climb up there, it’s dangerous.”

  “Soon all be go,” the contractor said. “Mexicans take away. Night is good.” Then, as Finn climbed up on the porch, he nodded in his direction. “Grand kid—”

  “Yes, I think he’s a keeper,” Tom said, arriving a few seconds late at Chick’s meaning. “No, no, he’s my son.”

  “Son? You—son? Wah!” Shaking his head, he laughed in Tom’s face, baring his horrible teeth.

  Thinking of Suzanne, and of the crowd of predatory neighbors for whom she stood, Tom kept his composure and made himself smile back. “Funny, but true,” he said.

  “You old man!”

  “I’m forty-six.” This with gritted teeth.

  The contractor chuckled, as if at a transparent fib.

  Later that evening, the wind got up, and the loose tarps and plastic sheeting thunderclapped overhead. Refusing to stay in his own room, Finn colonized Tom’s bed, where he stayed awake till after eleven, demanding ever more episodes in the new Mister Wicked story, which involved the hijacking of an amphibious tour-bus carrying a party of pre-schoolers on a field trip. Tom eventually managed to bore him to sleep. Late-night whisky in hand, he peered out between the drapes of the bedroom window: the mounds had vanished, though he’d heard no sound from the Mexicans, only irregular drumrolls and cannonades from the roof.

  Finn had somehow filled the bed with elbows, knees, and feet. Tom dozed shallowly, in fits and starts—a hectic and distressing ride through a succession of inhospitable dream-landscapes. He was a confused tourist, lost in a multi-story parking garage, then among ruins that might have been East Berlin in the 1950s. He was a pedestrian walking the breakdown-lane of an American freeway that became the tunnels of the London Tube. He was with Finn, in a fast-moving crowd at an airport much like Chicago’s O’Hare, where Finn disappeared and Tom was running, crying out his name. In his last dream, he was in a house besieged by shouting men. He woke to find himself in a house besieged by shouting men.

  Riding through the dark in the red truck, cruising Dumpsters, Chick, in the passenger seat, discussed his theory with Lázaro: the kid wasn’t really the American’s son, but the son of a relative, perhaps a cousin, who had gone abroad or died.

  But Lázaro disagreed. The boy looked like him—“Same hair they got!” In America, he explained, he’d seen many such cases. The wife left the husband, and took all the money. Then she went gambling. “She in Las Vegas now. She play the slots.”

  “Las Vegas?” Chick said. “In Mexico?”

  “No. U.S. Like California.”

  “Wah! California I like to see.”

  The truck shuddered on a deep pothole. They were on an unlit street by the edge of a lake, driving past workshops, cranes, boats sitting high and dry on blocks.

  Across the water, the tall city was a dazzling blur, its myriad lights all run together in the rain. Lázaro braked for a Dumpster. “My uncle,
he go to California. Anaheim. Now he in jail.”

  “INS?”

  “No, he legal,” Lázaro said. “He do vehicular homicide. Drink too many beer, go on highway, make accident, lady die, get three years. Not young lady—old crazy lady. She drive like—” His hand fish-tailed through the air. “But police test Uncle Luis. Point-two-five percent. Three years.”

  Chick liberated a toaster-oven from the Dumpster before they filled it with trash. “I fix,” he said.

  “You fix that TV yet?”

  “Sure. He go good. He color-TV.”

  “The guy?” Lázaro said. “He got one TV alone, and poco, fourteen-inch. Some homes they got TV for every room, and the big wide-screen for NFL. Like I say, guy got no money.”