Waxwings

by Unknown

  He saw himself being hustled, under guard, on to a British Airways flight, with Finn sobbing in the background, held there by goons. He thought, I am not being rational about this, but the more he thought, the more likely it seemed that his fears were a form of merciful prescience. There was still—just—time to act.

  Two cigarettes later, he braved Chick in the basement.

  “Wanna beer?” The contractor opened the door of his new fridge, revealing an illuminated nest of thinly stocked shelves.

  “Thanks, but I won’t just now. Look—this is desperately inconvenient, I know, but something’s cropped up. You see, the police may be coming round.”

  “Police? You call police?” Something dark and nasty was brewing in Chick’s face.

  “No, no. I no call police—” Hearing himself stumble into pidgin, Tom wanted to claw the words back from the air. “It’s just that . . . Well, they might show up here, you see. To talk to me. And if you and the Mexicans were here, I thought . . . Of course, it’d be different if you were a citizen, or if you have a . . . green card?”

  “I got driver’s license,” Chick said, as one might say “I got a gun.”

  “Yes, but I think what you really need, probably, is a green card, isn’t it? I just don’t want to land you in trouble, that’s all. It’s only going to be a matter of a couple of days. After that—”

  “Jesús say he see you on TV. I tell him no. He dumber than a box of rocks, that guy.”

  “There’s been a stupid mix-up. They’re trying to sort it out. But just for the next day or two, it might be best if you weren’t here. I’m sorry.”

  “He say you in deep shit.” Hunch-shouldered, scowling, Chick gazed morosely over the contents of his den.

  “He’s wrong. That’s totally untrue. But he’d be in the shit if the police found him working here.” Tom wanted suddenly to punish Jesús.

  “Mexicans say no worry about police. INS only.”

  “That’s not the way I read it. And if you guys are undocumented, that’s going to be my responsibility, isn’t it? Then I really will be in the shit.”

  “Porch ain’t done still. Need wooding. Today get paint, forest-green, like you say.”

  “Great—look, I’m only suggesting that you lay off work, like, you know, tomorrow and the day after. Of course I want you to come back,” Tom said, addressing the TV set, the pile of folded clothes on the couch, the toaster oven, the fridge, the carpet samples. The orderly rectangle of ground the contractor had cleared in the wilderness of basement-stuff was far cosier than the Belltown condo. Chick had been studying Dr. Seuss and drinking 7-Up. The carpenter’s level lay on top of the TV, and a wooden shim had been carefully placed between one foot of the stand and the bare earth on which it stood. Tom had never imagined turfing someone out of his settled home, and he felt unexpectedly ashamed.

  “I’m sorry.”

  The contractor shrugged.

  “I hate to spring this on you . . .”

  Chick stared back at him from under the fatty violet bags that overhung his eyes, his face a mask of pure woe.

  “Look, the moment I get this business sorted out, I’ll call you. On your pager . . .”

  “Maybe,” Chick said, and began to roll up his sleeping bag.

  Beth read:

  Fishing for winter steelhead is like sex. Some days you just want to roll over. Others, it’s the only show in town.

  Debra had appointed herself the fishing columnist at Oroonoko.com, and her studio was littered with new gear bought on expenses: the frog-green waders in which Finn had gallumphed around the room, waving the landing-net at imaginary butterflies; the rod and box of gaudy tinseled flies he’d been forbidden to touch. Finn now sat huddled under a blanket, busy with his Game Boy, and from the plaid mound in the armchair came a stream of thin electronic chirps and peeps as he repelled the host of alien invaders.

  “I don’t know,” Beth said. “I just don’t know.”

  “About my column?” Debra said, alarm spreading through her face.

  “No—sorry, I haven’t finished reading yet. I think the opening’s very strong.”

  “You think it’s okay? The opening was hell.”

  “Really, it’s quite funny. Let me finish . . . ”

  I was using a No. 10 shooting head (my casting sucks). I tied on a Peacock Woolly Bugger, and got a great tug on my second cast into the riffle under the alders.

  Psyched, I cast again and lost my Woolly Bugger (my one and only, as you guessed) in a tree. So, back to the flybox! The Green Butt Skunk (its neck is green, but its butt is actually bright yellow) caught my eye . . .

  It took Debra another thousand words of mishaps and near-misses before she finally got her fish.

  “It reads great,” Beth said. “A little heavy on the parentheses, perhaps. You could lose one or two of those, I think. The only other thing that struck me was, I’d like to see a tad more about the river—you know, the color of the water and that kind of thing?”

  “Yeah, nature. I’ve never been any good at that. Human-interest’s really more me. But did you like the part about the fish looking like a winking silver platter?”

  “Sweet image.”

  “ ‘Winking’ was the hard word to get.”

  “I can see. It would be.”

  At last Beth got to talk—in cautious code, with Finn in the room— about Tom.

  “Of course I don’t think so. Of course not. It’s inconceivable. But—”

  “You don’t think he did, but you don’t know he didn’t. You don’t, like, totally know, right?”

  “Maybe. I guess.”

  “That’s so like me and Joel. The not knowing.”

  “He couldn’t have.”

  “The times I said that about Joel.”

  “He’s just not programmed that way. It’s not in him.”

  “Ted Bundy worked for the Samaritans answering phones. Everybody thought he was the kindest, most understanding guy. Until they found the bodies of those women up on Taylor Mountain.”

  “You’d never find Tom doing that. He’s way too self-centered.”

  “Joel did.”

  “What?”

  “He worked for the Samaritans,” Debra said, making it sound like murder.

  “My big worry is what to do about . . .” Here Beth nodded in the direction of the beeping plaid hump. “Of course c’est trés important pour le garçon de voir son père—tu comprends?”

  “Sorry. Me no spikkee. Me from Rapid City, South Dakota, remember?”

  So Beth said, sotto voce: “Important . . . for . . . Finn . . . to . . . see . . . his . . . dad.”

  “Got you,” Debra said.

  “I talked to the doctor today. His shrink,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I should take it seriously, but she has some real concerns about this character that . . . my ex . . . tells him stories about—like bedtime stories? He’s called . . .” She glanced over at Finn, then wrote “Mister Wicked” on the back of a page from Debra’s fishing column and passed it across to her.

  “Mister Wicked?” she said, then, snapping a hand up to her mouth, “Sorry.”

  “ ‘Mister Wicked!’ ” Finn’s head emerged from under the blanket. “He’s cool.”

  “Pumpkin, I was just telling—”

  “You know what? Everything he wears is black. He wears a black hat, and a black jacket, and black pants, and he’s got a ’lectric rainbow bow-tie. He works it from a switch in his pocket. When he switches it on, it whirrs round and round. He goes all over Seattle doing wicked things.”

  “Thank you, pumpkin.”

  “And there’s Moira the witch. She’s Mister Wicked’s friend. She can fly around on her magic Hoover, and she helps him do his wicked stuff . . .”

  “That sounds cool,” Debra said.

  “They are cool. They’re the coolest people. They’re wicked. ” He pulled the blanket over his head and returned to his war, but then popped out again. “Mom? Can I go to my dad’s hou
se tonight—please?”

  “No, pumpkin. We’ve been through this. I told you, maybe tomorrow.”

  “Can you tell me a Mister Wicked story?”

  “Finn, I don’t know how.”

  “It’s easy. You have to start ‘As was his wont . . .’ ”

  “Do go back to your Game Boy, honey.”

  “Sorry to have started this,” Debra said.

  “You couldn’t know.”

  Beth and Finn left for the eleventh floor a few minutes later. As they were going out the door, Debra said, “For the next column, I thought I’d fly to New Orleans for a long weekend and fish for red drum in the bayous. Want to come?”

  “I wish, but I’d get fired. We open in Chicago in March, and the whole site’s gone totally insane.”

  Later, when Finn was safely asleep, Beth called upstairs on the phone. Debra thought Mister Wicked a very ominous sign indeed; it would be crazy to trust Finn to the sole overnight care of “that man.” Tom could visit Finn at the condo, “but only when you’re there.” Beth’s instinct was to believe that both Karen Eusebio and Debra were vastly exaggerating the dangers, yet she was was depressed to find herself in a minority of one.

  She was tempted to dial Tom’s number, but delayed doing so until she’d brewed a mug of camomile tea, and then she was too sleepy to face the inevitable chess-moves and fencing-maneuvers that any conversation with Tom required. But she dreamed of him that night, and in her sleep he was neither evil nor unkind.

  For the first time in ages, it seemed, Tom could hear the peevish churring and keening of the crows. Without Chick and his crew, the house was forlornly silent. Listening to a faint noise that he could not immediately place, Tom realized it was the thump-thump-thump of his own heart.

  He went down to the basement. Chick had removed all his possessions, along with the old couch, and a flattening of the earth beyond the furnace was the only sign that anyone had ever lived here. He was so thoroughly and completely gone that it might have been tempting to doubt his existence, were it not for the junk-staging that clung to the west side of the house, and the half-built porch, now criss-crossed with red plastic tape to warn off unwary callers at the front door. Yesterday’s racket of saws, shouts, and hammering now came back to Tom as a companionable memory, and he would have given a great deal to hear it return.

  He was summoned upstairs by the pealing of the phone.

  “Hello?”

  There was a man’s voice at the other end—elderly, reedy, emphysematic. “There’s a few things I’d like to discuss with you, if I may,” it began, amiably enough. “You murdering pervert Jew—” What followed was only partially comprehensible, but the gist of it appeared to be that Tom was living proof of the truth of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He banged the receiver back into its cradle.

  It must be because of my hair, he thought. Who was this unhinged old toad? A neighbor? Some loony professor-emeritus at the U, or a fellow-shopper at Ken’s? He recalled a shuffling, shrunken, papery-skinned geezer who often stood ahead of him in the checkout line with his cans of catfood and frozen turkey dinners. Was it him? Certainly, the voice would fit. And if the man knew his name and phone number, he must know his address, too. In a country where eccentrics routinely drove their opinions home with bullets from semi-automatic handguns, there was much to fear from even the most bent and arthritic basket-cases. He might have to bring his oxygen supply with him when he called, but he could still kill.

  When the phone rang again ten minutes later, Tom waited for the answering machine to pick it up. From the loudspeaker came a slow, drawling, Oxbridge English voice saying, with unsettling aptness, “Oh. Tom. Just wanted to find out if you were still in the land of the living.”

  “David—it’s me. I’m here. Let me turn off the machine . . .”

  “Ah, an actual human voice, how nice. How are you? And the book? Not interrupting in the middle of a sentence, am I? How’s Betsy? How’s the kid?” Having disposed of the pleasantries, Scott-Rice got down to business. He was “rather hoping” that UW could see its way to paying him $15,000 up front on his fee, plus the airfare, as he’d prefer to buy his own ticket in London.

  Listening to these demands, Tom realized he hadn’t heard from Shiva Ray in over a month, which was unusual. To Scott-Rice, he said that he thought there were still a few odds and sods of paperwork to tie up, and that he’d drop a note to the department chairman to find out where things stood.

  “I’d be v. grateful if you would,” Scott-Rice said. “To tell you the truth, I’m in a bit of a hole. The Inland Revenue boys . . . they’re being ridiculously unreasonable. My accountant tells me it’s time to throw a bone to the wolf, or whatever the phrase is. But I’m having a spot of bother finding the bone. It’s rather a big bone, actually: twenty-five grand. But if your chaps could stump up fifteen thousand American by January twentieth, I think I might just be able to put it together . . .”

  “I can’t speak for the department, of course, but I’d be amazed if we could get anything for you by then.”

  “The b-word has been mentioned . . .”

  “The what?”

  “Bankruptcy.” Scott-Rice made the one word sound like three.

  “Oh, dear, is it really that bad?”

  “Bad? You can’t have a bank account. Or a credit card. You have to pay for everything in cash. I can’t imagine anything worse.”

  For a moment, Detective Nagel and the missing child slipped Tom’s mind, and he felt the faint warming glow of schadenfreude.

  “And everybody knowing . . . the public disgrace of it. I tell you, this is about as serious as it can get.”

  Clearly, there was no point in speaking to Scott-Rice about his own predicament: compared with having to pay cash for everything, it would hardly qualify as a predicament at all.

  “So you can see why I’m counting on you.”

  “Of course I’ll do whatever I can, but—”

  “Well, just remember, will you, that I am facing total ruin? I mean, it’s like that bloody Dickens novel, you know the one. The Marshalsea.”

  “Little Dorrit.”

  “Yes. And where the hell is she when I need her? That’s what I’m obviously lacking—a devoted daughter with twenty-five thousand quid in readies.”

  The more Scott-Rice blew his financial troubles into comic opera, the more Tom wished he could unload a few of his miseries on the scapegrace novelist. But he knew Scott-Rice. He’d never catch his ear. He thought—briefly—of his comfortable bank balance, and of Beth’s ever-multiplying stock options. She was now, he very much suspected, a technical millionaire. But they’d never get it back. Nobody who gave Scott-Rice money ever did.

  “Heigh-ho. I must say I cannot imagine life without my flexible friend.”

  “Can’t you ask your publisher to help out?”

  “Don’t talk to me about fucking publishers. They’re all run by bloody accountants now. It’s as bad as dealing with the Inland Revenue. Worse. You heard that poor old Terry got booted out by the Nazis?”

  “No, I didn’t—”

  “Well, he did, a couple of weeks before Christmas. On his ear. Now I have to deal with a dreadful spotty teenager. Looks like the office boy. Named Kevin. Kevin! Can you beat it?”

  “I ought to call him . . .” Tom said.

  “Oh, you won’t get any joy out of that, I can tell you. What do you imagine he reads? Comics, I would think. Comics and girlie mags and balance-sheets.”

  “I mean Terry, not Kevin.”

  “Oh, Terry. Yes, I suppose one should. But with my problems . . .” He sighed extravagantly. “It’s dog-eat-dog in London now. It’s brutal. Hobbesian. People getting murdered on the street for their cellphones. Carjackings everywhere. In broad daylight. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to escaping to Washington State for a breather. Mountains. Water. Pine trees. Those little baby oysters . . . How I envy you the peace and quiet of it!” He made the sound of sniffing the Seattle air
down the telephone line like a wine buff inhaling a rare bouquet. “Heaven!”

  When Scott-Rice finally hung up, his last words rang in Tom’s ear. “Remember: total ruin!”