Waxwings

by Unknown

  When a woman in a red Jeep cut in ahead of him without signalling, he slammed the heel of his hand on the horn. “Thoughtless fucking bitch!” Then, stuck behind a slow-moving U-Haul van: “Will you get a fucking move-on?” To Beth he said, “You’ve betrayed me, you’ve betrayed our child, and you’ve betrayed yourself.”

  His tires screeched as he yanked the car into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. He stood, bristling, at the counter, waiting for the clerk, a turbanned Sikh who was talking into a mobile phone, to acknowledge his presence.

  “Box of Marlboros. No, not those—the red ones.”

  The price shown on the till was a surprise. He dug into his pocket for more change.

  “Matches?”

  Yes, of course—one would need matches.

  That’ll show her!

  But he was able now to grin at the absurdity of the thought. When he returned to the car, he was back in control, and alone. Buying the cigarettes had exiled Beth to the margin of his attention, and as he settled into the traffic flow, counting the street numbers to his turn-off, he found his anger gone.

  He’d last come out here about a year before Finn was born. Ian Tatchell had discovered the footpath along Sammamish Slough, which he described admiringly as “possibly the flattest twelve-mile walk in the entire American West.” Tom and Ian, together with the Tatchells’ black mutt, Engels, had spent a summer Sunday afternoon ambling along this undemanding trail, stopping at intervals to visit what Ian insisted on calling “pubs.” With help from the street atlas, Tom found his way to the same brick-strewn clearing where he and Ian had parked six years before.

  More canal than river, the slough ran between thickets of dead rushes. The water was beer-colored, its surface lightly scrolled with calligraphic doodles of current. Ian had claimed there were salmon in it, but the water looked like lifeless industrial effluent. If he were a fish, Tom thought, he’d hold his nose for the duration of the long swim upstream from Lake Washington to Lake Sammamish.

  The paved trail led, in its early stages, through a nondescript civic park, surprisingly empty of people. A bald and skimble-shanked old man in running gear—apparently on the brink of death—panted past, and then two powerfully-built Valkyrie types whizzed by, hunched athletically over their Rollerblades, gloved hands swinging within an inch or two of the ground, blonde ponytails flying from behind identical black helmets. But mostly Tom had the path to himself. Limbering up gently for the walk to come, he strolled the easy mile to the first “pub,” a windowless cinder-block bunker, painted purple, with a Budweiser sign over the door. Here he stopped for a vile microwaved cheeseburger and a glass of beer that he nursed but did not drink.

  The dirty ashtray on the bar prompted Tom to burrow deep inside his overcoat for the Marlboros. There was nostalgic pleasure in disrobing the box of its cellophane wrapping and tweaking the foil covering aside to expose the triple-banked, cork-colored muzzles of the cigarettes. Feeling like a clumsy amateur, he shook one free from the box and lit up. The smoke tasted foul, like leaf-mould; trying to inhale, he felt immediately giddy and nauseous. After the third determined drag, he stubbed it out, snapping the cigarette in two, then paid the bartender and resumed his walk.

  Past Woodinville, the trail entered a kind of no-man’s-land, a scruffy border-country of allotments, or, as Beth called them, “pea-patches,” collapsing sheds, hen-houses, horse-paddocks, overgrown truck-farms. The slough was fringed by bare poplars and dense tangles of blackberry and salal. The forested hills were scarred with outcrops of new tract-housing, and from the road that rimmed the eastern side of the valley came the growling surf of continuous traffic. This unlovely, accidental, unincorporated landscape featured regularly on the late-night local news, where Tom had seen the home videos of bears and cougars that regularly blundered out of the wilderness to take up residence here. He shared the animals’ confusion: each time he looked beyond the brambles to the fields, he saw them differently—now rural, now suburban, now wild, now tame. A tawny mountain lion would find perfect cover in the tall sedge grasses that grew on the fields’ edges; a black bear would make its den in the ruined outhouse of that abandoned farm. Bred to revere ambiguities of the academic, literary sort, Tom warmed to the double meanings in this wide, untidy stretch of countryside—as vividly un-English a place as any he’d ever seen—and amused himself by picturing Sussex with bears, or cougars in Wanstead.

  He stopped at a King County public toilet and sat for a while on the wooden bench outside it, placed there in loving memory of Holly W. Klingman, 1938–1997. Wondering if a cigarette would taste differently in the open air, he discovered it did. This time, when he took the smoke deep into his lungs, trapping it inside his chest for a few seconds before exhaling, it was as if the last five years had never been, and he was back—in a feat of pure magic—to being himself again, at home after a long spell abroad. There was a fresh ripple to the landscape now, a sharpness of focus he recalled from the past, but which had eluded him through all the fog-bound years of his abstention. He smoked the cigarette down to the filter-tip, marveling at the sudden, intense lucidity that had come to him out of the blue, an unexpected gift.

  He walked with purpose now, lengthening his stride, the skirts of his long coat brushing against his calves. He thought—for the first time in months—of his unwritten, unwriteable book, that brimming cardboard box of scattered riffs and takes on polymorphous, polyphonic, polycentric America. The trouble was that the box contained descriptions of a thousand trees but not one glimpse or glimmer of the forest.

  “On your left!” The bicyclist sped by, a grotesque insect in his metallic sheath of Day-Glo spandex.

  The people who dared to see America whole were greenhorns and tourists. Chick had said, “He make joke on America,” and it was true. That was Billy Wilder’s genius: he was at once utterly knowing, in an old-world way, and utterly fresh-off-the-boat. If the stuff in the box was ever to turn into a book, Tom would need to hijack the eyes and ears of someone considerably more innocent and more assured than he was. He’d have to sack his Public Radio persona, the mild Hungarian-born English prof, and find an altogether more interesting character to do the job.

  Like a black paper cut-out against the sky, a raptor of some sort was hovering a hundred feet or so above the slough. Tom took it for a bald eagle, then, squinting more closely, decided it was a red-tailed hawk. When he’d first arrived in the Northwest, the only birds he could name were starlings, crows, and house-sparrows; the rest of the garden birds were nameless, strange, exotic as parakeets. He’d learned them, one by one, out of a book, as greenhorns must. Nowadays when he caught sight of a varied thrush or a western tanager, he didn’t race for the binoculars hoping to earn a footnote in ornithological history. His eye had dulled with experience. The character he was looking for should be as scandalizeable as Tom had been when he first spotted a red-shafted flicker in the yard. When he described the flicker to Beth, she said that she’d once read about a bird like that, in the Book of Revelation.

  There were several possible candidates for the post Tom had in mind. He thought of William Cobbett, growing rutabagas on Long Island; maybe he could dig up Cobbett for the book, just as Cobbett had dug up the bones of Thomas Paine. Fanny Trollope, perhaps? That “vulgar, pushing woman,” as Robert Browning called her, with her failed “Bazaar” in Cincinnati, had a wonderfully imitable style—garrulous, snobbish, and funnier than she deserved to be. Or Dickens, in American Notes. Tom remembered him mounting a performance of dutiful romantic awe at Niagara Falls . . .

  Pastiche was his medium; he could do those voices.

  He could almost hear them in his head: Mrs. Trollope at the food court; Cobbett on stock options; Dickens, in frock coat and gaiters, on the ski-lift at Snoqualmie. These would be his characters. He’d try and summon the vigor and arrogance of England in the nineteenth century in order to catch something of the vigor and arrogance of America in the last days of the twentieth.

  He lit another cigare
tte. The idea had no shape, no architecture, but it felt like the precious donnée that had escaped him for so long. He’d begun Tunnels and The Few on less. It would at least entitle him to bear away stacks of books from the library. He needed to look at some of the less famous English visitors to the U.S.—Captain Basil Hall, for instance. And Captain Marryat. There must be many that he’d never heard of. He would read them all. Before he could start to write, he would need to become a Victorian literary tourist himself.

  It was as if a long inviting room had suddenly opened itself to him: flower-smelling, book-lined, tall-windowed, furnished with big deep leather chairs, a wood fire burning in the hearth. Here he would live for the next few months—and on a mentally expansive scale, in keeping with the room’s generous proportions. After the miseries of the last weeks, it looked like deliverance. He could be happy here, he was sure of it.

  Smiling at his luck, Tom stopped and flipped his cigarette into the slough. When the butt hit the surface, quite far out, it was met by a great finny swirl in the brown water and a splash like that of a dropped brick. For an instant, Tom saw the hole in the water where the fish—if fish it was—had been. The cigarette was gone.

  Hardly believing what he’d seen, he broke off the filter from another cigarette and lobbed it hopefully out. This one sailed slowly and erratically downstream on the current until it was lost to sight, but he had glimpsed Leviathan.

  It was sunset and abruptly, shiveringly cold when he turned off the trail to find another of Ian’s peculiar pubs. He downed a Glenfiddich and water (“No ice!”), smoked two Marlboros, and asked the bartender to call a cab. Then he rode back to his car, staring out at the dark landscape and daydreaming about his book. The word “green” should be in the title somewhere: green for greenhorns, green for the color of American money, green for “the grass is always greener . . .” The Green Stuff ? With, or without, the article?

  On KIRO 7 Eyewitness News that night, the lead story was about Mayor Schell’s cancellation of Seattle’s millennial festivities. From the tone of the report, one might have thought that the millennium itself had been put on hold. Still looking a little shaky from the beating he’d taken over the WTO riots, the mayor blinked at the journalists and said the risk of a terrorist attack on Seattle Center and the Space Needle was too great for him to ignore. “These are unusual times,” he said. “We don’t want to take chances with public safety. We want a safe and family-friendly transition into the next century. It’s safer to be prudent.” The late-night network wits would eat this up, and the mayor seemed to know it. With his big conk of a nose and baggy bloodhound eyes, he had the air of a man gloomily resigned to becoming a national figure of fun.

  Next up was an item about the search for yet another missing child. Children seemed to disappear as frequently as cats on the suburban fringes of the city—shots of neighbors combing woods and frogmen leaping into ponds were a regular feature on the local news—and Tom paid little attention to the story until the floodlit live reporter said “Sammamish River Trail.” The screen filled with a picture of a little girl: Hayley Topolski, aged six, her big cheesy grin full of absent teeth. In voiceover, the reporter said that Hayley and her brother, Taylor, eight, had been playing hide-and-seek near the slough under the supervision of their fourteen-year-old sister, Maddie. Hayley had been hiding. When she was gone for over half an hour, Maddie raised the alarm. The King County Sheriff’s Department had issued a composite sketch of a “person of interest” in the case.

  Unlike the usual Wanted Man drawings, this sketch was of a monster. A cigarette protruded from fat banana lips. The creature’s hair, perched atop a massive domed forehead, was a collapsing heron’s nest. Recessed black-button eyes were overhung by copious, shaggy, crosshatched brows. Tom’s first, fleeting thought was that the artist must have copied the picture of the Giant from a nineteenth-century edition of “Jack and the Beanstalk,” then touched it up with details from the Wolf Man, Godzilla, and King Kong. Then he saw that the sketch was a grotesque caricature of himself.

  “The man is described as white, five-foot-nine to five-foot-ten, with gray Afro-style hair, weighing around two hundred twenty pounds . . .”

  The news shifted to a different crime-scene, but the image that Tom continued to see on the screen was of his own face, ridiculously, repellently transfigured. He grabbed the remote and aimed it at the set, thumbing through the channels in search of another glimpse of the blubber-lipped savage. On KOMO, a hoarse-voiced bully was peddling used RVs; on KING, Paul Schell was cancelling the millennium again; on the cable news station, a commentator was grieving over the latest Seahawks loss. But there was no real doubt in Tom’s mind. That hair, that egghead cranium, that cigarette: it had to be him. Someone had made a preposterous mistake, and he’d better put them right.

  The phone in the living room had never quite recovered from an experiment in which Finn had plastered the keypad with peanut butter; the numbers stuck fast if you pressed them ever so slightly too hard, and it took three attempts to get 911 ringing. And ringing and ringing and ringing. Tom was indignant: what if he were trying to report a fatal accident, or an intruder in the house? At long last—by which time the intruder would surely have shot him dead—the emergency operator came on, sounding impatient even before he had a chance to state his business.

  “Ah,” Tom said. “Good evening. I wonder if I can have a word with somebody from the King County Sheriff’s Department?” He pronounced King and County and Sheriff as if they were Sanskrit or Urdu words—conveying, or so he hoped, his status as a public-spirited citizen with no direct prior experience of policemen.

  The sound came from a long way away—a thin chirruping, like the cry of a baby bird, that grew steadily closer until Beth was awake enough to snake out a hand from under the covers and yank up the phone from the floor beside the bed.

  “Yes?”

  “Beth!”

  “Debra?”

  “Beth!”

  “What?”

  “Oh my god, Beth—you mean you didn’t see the news?”

  The duty officer in the Sheriff’s Department thanked Tom for his cooperation and his quick response. He was asked to spell his name twice, to recite the number he was calling from—“That checks out”—and told to expect a call in the morning.

  “You got a work number where you can be reached?”

  “I work from home.”

  “You’ll probably be talking to Detective Paul Nagel.”

  Tom clung to the name. It gave a welcome touch of ordinariness to this strange night-excursion. “I didn’t see those children,” he said.

  “Well, maybe you saw something else. Might not mean anything to you, but it could to the task force.”

  “There’s a task force?”

  “She’s not the only kid who’s gone missing in that neighborhood.”

  So a serial predator was on the loose—and the best the police could do was show that stupid, brutal cartoon on TV? No wonder most crimes went unsolved. Suppose the child had been Finn? Tom slammed the receiver back into its cradle.

  He was up drinking coffee hours before the phone rang at eight-thirty, and Detective Nagel sounded too casual by half. “I got hell’s own morning on my hands today. You should see the stack of reports I got to deal with. What was that—you having an earthquake up there?”

  “Builders,” Tom said.

  “Amounts to the same thing. Like I was saying, my morning’s shot. How would two-thirty this afternoon accommodate with your schedule?”

  Time dragged. Tom tried to interest himself in the construction of the porch. The rising skeleton of bare fir reminded him of the balsa-wood framework of the model airplanes that he used to build up in his childhood bedroom—those dedicated hours with an X-Acto knife, his fingertips horny with balsa cement. Chick was squatting athwart a narrow beam and inspecting an aluminum carpenter’s level.

  “I think green paint for the deck—a dark forest-green,” Tom said.

 
“You got it,” the contractor said without looking up.

  They were cross-bracing the interior of the porch. From deep inside the structure one of the Mexicans—Jesús or Luis—peered at him so intently that Tom felt himself blushing. For the rest of the morning, he blamed it on his paranoia, but the memory of that look kept returning to him—the insolent stare of someone recognising a newly famous face.

  He drove through the wet—more mist than rain—to the King County Courthouse. At Third and James, lowlife types in hooded sweatshirts stood smoking on the sidewalk, and with more than twenty minutes to kill, Tom joined them, adding his solitary plume of smoke to the criminal air. When a woman passer-by raked him with a savage glance, he ground the cigarette under his heel and headed inside, seriously afraid that the next stranger might actually assault him.

  At the security checkpoint, he caused a brief commotion when he set off the alarm—a vile high-pitched jangling that made it sound as if he had an Uzi stuffed down his trouser-leg. Fishing out his hoard of keys from the deep pocket of his overcoat, he realized that in this building they’d look like the tools of an unusually well-equipped burglar. A Hispanic guard sorted through them slowly and officiously, singling out the large, ancient, two-fanged key that unlocked the Ilford coal-shed. He showed the keys to a female colleague, who treated Tom to an exasperated shrug and waved him through.