Waxwings

by Unknown

  Chick grinned and scuffed his heels. “Nights I study. Read a whole bunch of books.” He did, too: he could recite The Cat in the Hat Comes Back! now, every word.

  This was no time for play.

  This was no time for fun.

  This was no time for games.

  There was work to be done . . .

  “That’s a wonderful thing—reading. Maybe you should go to school, get yourself a college degree, become a professional. You got the brains for it. You ever thought about signing up with a community college?”

  “No, Mr. Don.”

  “You ought to. Fellow like you, hell, you could be anything you wanted. You go back to school, I bet you could get yourself an M.B.A.”

  “Maybe I do that.”

  “You’d be doing yourself a good turn. See, it’s like this. There’s only one thing bothers me about you, Chick.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Don?”

  “You stole my Mexicans.”

  Chick emptied his face of all expression and dropped the cigar into the grass. “Job be finish. He over. I find new job for Mexican boys.”

  “Well, let’s just say you had ’em out on loan when I had no particular use for them. But now I want ’em back. Hey, Ernesto! Go get Lázaro for me, will you?”

  “They like work with me.” Chick knew Mr. Don’s terms: $8.50 an hour, and for cow-work. Chick paid $9.50, and the work was good—no fucking with asbestos and stuff. Even if he paid eleven bucks, he’d still be fat.

  Lázaro came shambling down to the sidewalk in a yellow hard-hat and ear-muffs, smiling his usual vacant, apologetic smile. He shrugged at Chick, then at Mr. Don, who began talking fast in Spanish. Chick studied Lázaro to guess at what was being said. “Sí,” Lázaro said, pushing his muffs up behind his ears, “Okay . . . sí . . . sí . . . sí . . .” Each time he spoke, he glanced sideways at Chick. Mr. Don appeared to be telling a long rambling story, with Lázaro listening to him like an obedient child. Chick was angry at his exclusion from the scene, and angrier still at Lázaro for his nodding, droop-shouldered, submission.

  Chick thought, Twelve dollar an hour.

  Mr. Don turned to him, and switched back into English. “Nice visiting with you. I’ll see you when I see you.” As the truck pulled out, he called, “And don’t forget about college.”

  “What he say?”

  Lázaro wouldn’t look at him, directly. “He say we go to his yard at eight in the morning, or he talk to friend he know in INS.”

  “He shitting you, man. Guy do bad stuff. Guy do asbestos. He no talk to INS, no way.”

  “He know where we live, on Greenwood.”

  “He tell you crock-of-shit story to scare your bones.”

  “Is not we.” Lázaro gazed at the ground as if a secret was buried there. “Is you and he.”

  “Tell you what. Here’s the deal. Thirteen dollar. I pay thirteen dollar an hour.” Chick held out his hand and put on his grinning, management face, like the boss in the Men’s Wearhouse commercials. “I guarantee it.”

  Lázaro’s hands stayed locked in his jeans pockets. He shook his head. “That guy—what he say, he do.”

  They brought down the remainder of the tree, Lázaro handling the chain-saw. By the time they’d piled the two trucks high with logs, the afternoon was darkening into chilly night, and lights were coming on in all the houses. They left the boughs on the lawn, in sawdust deep as a dirty fall of snow. When the old woman came out, Chick forestalled her complaints by waving his hand dismissively at the mess.“Yard waste,” he said, taking hold of one of the smaller boughs as if he were about to haul it off. But once he had the $500 in his hand, he dropped the bough where it stood and walked to his truck.

  They drove in convoy to the wood lot on Rainier, Lázaro riding with Chick. Gridlocked in the rush-hour traffic around Mercer, Chick said, “Okay, you and Ernesto, you go with him. Jesús, and Dany, and Victor, and Sandro, they go with me.”

  “He say everybody go with him.”

  “You crazy, man. Work make you sick. He pay shit.”

  Lázaro sat low and crumpled in the seat. His big hands, criss-crossed with bloody scratches, were spread wide on his knees. “Sorry, Chick.”

  “Why you sorry?”

  Lázaro sighed. “No only me I look out for. I got wife. I got kid.”

  “Hey,” Chick snickered, leaning across to lightly slap Lázaro’s knee. “Nobody perfect!”

  “When’s my dad going to be here?”

  “Soon.”

  Face pressed to the glass, Finn looked out into the dark and watched the snow. The tiny flakes, far apart, were darting every which way like fish in a tank. Many of the flakes appeared to be falling upwards, as if the sky was sucking them back from the ground. As soon as they touched the railing of the balcony, they turned into boring raindrops. Squinching his eyes tight, concentrating as hard as he knew how, Finn willed the world otherwise. The snowflakes grew plump and feathery, whitening the darkness outside, settling on the city in drifts and hillocks, turning cars on the streets into bulgy, ghostlike shapes. They’d have to close the schools. You could build a snowman right in the middle of the road, and make snow angels. There’d be just kids out there, snowball fights and sleds, and the soft crunch of snow under your shoes. And it was all so very nearly happening.

  “I think it’s sticking.”

  “I don’t think so, pumpkin. It’s not cold enough for it to stick.”

  “But it will be. It’ll stick in the night. When we get up tomorrow, we’ll have tons and tons of snow.”

  “It’s not in the forecast.”

  “You don’t know everything.”

  “No, but I don’t want you to get your hopes up and then be disappointed in the morning.” His mom came over to the window. “It’s hardly even what you’d call sleet.”

  “It’s snow.” Finn felt her hand in his hair. If he could make her believe in it too, it would happen. “Look over there. You can see it’s snow.” But he heard the whine of doubt in his own voice, and seemed now to be looking out the window through his mom’s eyes, seeing what she saw: smuts of gray ice, melting into rain. It wasn’t fair. She was spoiling everything. Without his mom there, Finn was certain there’d be proper snow.

  The ding-dong doorphone chimed, and Finn charged across the room to answer it. “Daddy?” Everybody who came to the building sounded like a twangy space alien, and his dad’s deep, crackly “Finbow!” came in from like Mars, or Jupiter. He pressed the button and let himself out of the apartment to wait by the elevator doors.

  He flattened himself against the wall, so his dad wouldn’t see him, and listened to the sighs and groans that rose from deep inside the shaft. He heard laughter from a lower floor, but it wasn’t his dad’s. With an elevator, you never knew quite who was coming, and had to be prepared for surprises.

  When his father stepped out of the cage, he seemed unsure about which way to go. “Here I am!” Finn shouted, launching himself like a flying dog. Hugging Finn tight, his dad gave him a rough bristly kiss. Finn quickly squirmed away, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. His dad smelled all wrong, like he was somebody else. His breath came out of him in moldy gusts that made Finn think of burned bacon and cat pee and dead flowers.

  “Oh, Finn—I’ve missed you.”

  “I missed you too,” Finn said, in a small, hurried voice. He was staring at his dad’s lips, which always looked bigger than other grown-ups’, but never so big as now. They were patterned with hundreds and hundreds of tiny criss-cross lines, like the wrinkly skins of the banana slugs who lived in a mason jar in the Skylight Room. Finn didn’t want to kiss those lips. Beginning to panic, he buried his face in the long damp coat, feeling his dad’s hands on his shoulders, holding him close. But the sense of strangeness wouldn’t go. The sour, old-man smell was in his clothes, too. Something was happening to his dad, Finn didn’t know what, but he suddenly wanted to be back in the apartment with his mom.

  Inside, Finn watched and listen
ed intently while pretending to gaze out the window at the snow.

  “You look better than I expected, “ his mom said. “You’ve got your color back, at least. How is it?”

  “How do you think it is?” His dad sounded cross. He sat down in the couch, still wearing his black overcoat. “Of course it’s not uninteresting. I don’t quite know how I’d rate it as an experience, though. Somewhere between major dental surgery and winning a free weekend in Grozny or Kosovo.”

  “You’re cleared now?”

  “It’s rather hard to tell. I think so. Well, I think so most of the time, when I’m not going through bouts of howling paranoia.”

  “Vooze avay voo le jon-darm on core?”

  Finn really hated it when his mom spoke French.

  “Yes. A couple of days ago. I like him, actually. He’s a good egg. Except that he says he writes screenplays, and I have a horrible feeling he’s going to ask me to read one.”

  “Eh lonfon? Laperteet fee yet?”

  “Zilch. Disparoo sawn trass.”

  “Can you imagine what they must be going through?”

  He saw his dad’s eyes swerve over to him, then move quickly away. “Yes, I can.”

  They were talking bad stuff, in special voices, not wanting him to be there. Finn didn’t know exactly how people had a divorce, but he thought his mom and dad might be having one right now. There was something dangerous and secret going on, like they were getting ready for a big shouting fight and he’d have to hide.

  Then things seemed to get more normal. After phoning for pizza, his mom said that the only wine she had was weeks old, but she got it out of the fridge. His dad tasted it, said it had gone to vinegar, and drank it anyway. When Finn looked out the window, he couldn’t see a single speck of white in the rain.

  “It won’t snow tonight, Finbow. The temperature’s getting warmer. This is the beginning of the Pineapple Express.”

  “What’s the Pineapple Express?”

  “It’s hot wet air blowing up here all the way from Hawaii, where they grow pineapples. It brings high temperatures and heavy rain.”

  “I want the Snow Express.”

  “Well, you’ll need a cold wind from the northwest, blowing across the ocean from Russia and Alaska. The north wind doth blow, and we shall have snow . . .”

  “And what will poor Robin do then, poor thing? With his head up his ass and his mouth full of glass, he’ll have to shit out of his wing, poor thing.”

  “Finn! Where did you learn that?”

  “In pre-school. With his head up his ass—”

  “All right. Once was quite enough, thank you.”

  When they sat down at the table to eat pizza, his dad asked him boring questions about Treetops and what he’d been doing. That stuff wasn’t interesting to talk about, and he’d forgotten most of it; besides, it was over. But his dad went on at him like he had to remember every stupid thing, which he wouldn’t want to even if he could. “I don’t know,” he said, or “It was okay.” He was actually relieved when his mom began to talk, in French, about “la fair Sammamish”.

  “I don’t think so,” his dad said. “It was a very momentary brush with celebrity. That sketch must have been on screen for all of ten seconds.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, nothing, Finbow. Just a silly picture of someone I saw on TV.”

  Later, when his dad was in the bathroom, Finn whispered, “My dad smells funny.”

  “I know. He’s been smoking those stinky cigarettes again.”

  “Is he going to die? Spencer’s grandma died. She died of cigarettes. She smoked fifty cigarettes in one single day.”

  “Don’t worry, pumpkin—he’ll stop. We’ll tell him to.”

  When his dad came back, Finn said: “You got to stop smoking cigarettes, or you’ll die.”

  His dad looked not at him but at his mother. “What’s this—the maternal propaganda machine?”

  “He brought it up, not me.”

  They stared at each other across the table. Finn could hear them both breathing. If anybody said anything, he thought, it was going to be something really mean. He waited, looking from face to face. At last his dad stretched out his arm to Finn and said, “You’re right. It’s stupid. I won’t do it anymore.”

  But Finn wasn’t sure he could trust him. It sounded like he was just saying it.

  “My friend Spencer, his grandma, she died. Her lungs went black and got all shriveled, and then she went to the hospital and died. They had to burn her up. Then they had a big party and made Spencer wear a tie.”

  “That’s so sad,” his mom said.

  “I don’t think they were sad.” He tried to remember what Spencer had said. “I think they had fun.”

  “Well, I expect Spencer’s grandma is in heaven now.”

  “No she isn’t. She’s in a jar. They put her in a jar and buried it in the ground. That was after they burned her and there wasn’t nothing of her left, except white ashy stuff. She didn’t hardly fill a little jar.”

  “That’s pretty interesting, Finbow.”

  “She was rather old, anyway. Can I have ice-cream?”

  At bedtime, his dad took charge and started a new Mister Wicked story when he was still in the bath. As was his wont, Mister Wicked was reading the classifieds in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he spotted an ad for an old Washington State ferry, really cheap at $99.99. Neither Mister Wicked nor Moira knew how to drive a ship, so they had a few accidents.

  The story continued in bed, but Finn was only half-listening, distracted by the cigarette-smell and by the strangeness of being with his dad in the condo.

  “. . .‘You loony old fool!’ Moira shouted. ‘Look what you’ve done now, you nincompoop! You dunderhead! You great galumphing lummox! ’ ”

  “Are you going to live here now?”

  “What? No, Finbow, I’m just visiting this evening.”

  “You could sleep in my mom’s bed.”

  “That’s not an option.”

  “You can sleep in my bed, if you want. I don’t care.”

  “Thank you.” His dad kissed him on the forehead. “But not tonight. After you’re asleep, I’m going back to our house on the hill.”

  “Okay.” Finn felt sort of relieved: he didn’t really want that smell in his bed all night. When his dad went on with the story, he soon lost track, imagining himself somewhere else—not in the condo, not in the house on the hill, but in some place snowy, like up in the mountains, where the snow was so deep that whole houses got buried underneath, and every tree was pure white. When he closed his eyes, he saw the dazzle of it, like glittering sugar, stretching all around him as far as he could see. Beside the deep purple shadows of his own footprints marched the smaller, shallower pawprints of his dog—whose name changed from dream to dream, and who sometimes had no name at all. With his tail like a tall black flag against the glaring white, the dog plunged ahead, throwing up exploding puffs of snow, but stopping every few moments to check on him. The dog was super-smart: he knew tons of stuff, and he was really, really kind. When Finn got tired, he and the dog would build an igloo. They’d snuggle together inside their snow-house, and the dog would keep him warm.

  “Debra, I can’t come up. Finn’s already asleep. And no, I don’t think Tom has a clue about what’s happening to him. He was talking about his ‘ten seconds of fame.’ I mean, it’s all over the fucking city. You know what he said about the detective on his case? ‘He’s a good egg.’ Can you imagine? It’s what Brits do for character analysis, you know? He’s a good egg. Or a bad egg. They’re subtle that way. That’s why none of them believe in therapy—they do the egg thing instead. Why they went to war with Hitler? He was a bad egg. Like this detective’s a good one. Jesus! No wonder he can’t process. That’s always been Tom’s problem, he just can’t process . . .”

  Then she remembered to ask: “How’s the column coming?”

  The only message on the answering machine said: “O
kay, I got that number. I’ll call him right back. Yes? Oh. Paul Nagel, King County Sheriff’s Office. Message for Thomas Janeway. Sorry about that article in the Stranger. Yeah—I’m talking to his voice-mail right now. Thomas? Uh, about that article. I wanted you to know that if it came out of this department, it didn’t come from me. But my guess is that those goddamn kids figured it out for themselves, and futzed it up, like the media always does. Anyway, like I said, I’m sorry, and our media-relations officer will make a clarifying statement. Feel free to call if you’ve got any questions.” The terminal click was followed by a mechanical soprano voice saying, “Wed-nez-day. Ten. Forty. Seven. A. M. End of. Final Message.”