Waxwings

by Unknown

  “Oh, Finn—don’t feed it from the table. Please.”

  But the animal was already messily disposing of the sausage, exposing needle-like white fangs. Tom had forgotten to order paper towels from HomeGrocer.com, so he cleaned the muck off the floor with toilet tissue, soiling his fingers in the process. The stink was formidable. He uncorked a bottle of red wine and poured himself a large glassful, which he took down in medicinal gulps. Then he remembered his guest. “Chick? Would you care for some?”

  “Sure,” he said, though the wine stayed untouched by his plate.

  “Can Sugar bark?” Finn asked.

  “Yeah, big-time. Wanna see?” Chick turned himself around in his-chair, pulled a threatening face, and raised a clenched fist above his head. The dog cowered, whimpered, and shuffled backwards on its stomach, then went into a fit of frenzied yelping, as if it were being disembowelled. It managed to hit notes that Tom had not previously realized were audible to the human ear.

  “See? Bark good!” Chick, grinning, turned to Tom. “Guard dog.”

  “Sugar! It’s okay. Poor Sugar. It’s okay, Sugar. He didn’t mean it. He was playing. I love you, Sugar.”

  “Where did you find it?” Tom said, wondering what miserable history had taught the animal to respond like that to a raised hand.

  “Like I tell the kid, I make him new dog.”

  The puppy did indeed look very much like a piece of Chick’s handiwork, with the same singular, ingenious, makeshift character that distinguished his scaffolding and the new pillars on the porch.

  “American dog!” The contractor laughed extravagantly at his own joke.

  “Daddy? You can hold Sugar if you want.”

  Tom was tolerant of cats—he’d grown almost fond of Hodge—but had never cared for dogs and their unwinning combination of savagery and pathos. He gingerly took hold of the puppy, which gazed at him with prematurely wizened cynicism, then tried to sink its teeth into his fingers—not very hard, but hard enough.

  “Ouch!” He handed it back to Finn, who phoned his mother with the astounding news, but got her voice-mail on both numbers. “She needs obedience classes,” he said. As “Animal Planet’s” most loyal viewer, he’d always been a fountain of canine lore. “We have to get a clicker. And a training leash. A rawhide bone. And dog food. We really need dog food, Daddy. Can we go to Ken’s?”

  “What does she eat?” Tom asked.

  Chick mulled the question over. “Sausage,” he said.

  “Sit, Sugar, sit! Sit! Good doggie! Look, Daddy! No, doggie, no! We’ll get you some real chew-treats.”

  Elbows on his knees, chin cupped in his hands, Chick was smiling at the dog and boy with proprietorial, Pickwickian benevolence. He glanced at Tom and winked. “Happy like a pig in the shit, huh?”

  The cap was off the jar of mustard. The half-eaten remains of supper littered the table. Looking from his own empty glass to Chick’s full one, Tom saw a tableau of family life. He surprised himself with the thought We’re a family! Masked faces and crossed purposes were part of that. So was the temporariness of the arrangement. Families didn’t last long nowadays, and this one was going to break apart at any minute, but its ephemeral character made it no less authentic; quite the contrary. Every family, he thought, gets the dog it deserves, and the weird-looking Sugar seemed suddenly to fit right in, as if she’d always been lurking in the household in shadow form, but had waited until this moment to take substance.

  Unpeeling a tablet of nicotine gum from its foil, Tom said, “Where are you living now?”

  “I got a place. Rental.”

  “It’s just that, you know, if you still needed somewhere . . .”

  The puppy had Finn’s pant-leg between its teeth and was shaking it from side to side. Between shakes, it produced a falsetto snarl, like a midget two-stroke engine on a model airplane.

  “No, doggie! Sugar, don’t!”

  “Wang! Wang! Wang!” Chick bared his own snaggled teeth at Sugar, who instantly let go of Finn and wang-wanged back at the contractor in fluent, shrill Chinese.

  “Ice-cream, anyone?” Tom said, hoping to hold his ad hoc family together a little while longer. “Anyone for ice-cream?”

  “Chess!” Beth said.

  In a lull in the Battle of Chicago, Beth and Robert were eating late at Flying Fish. The din was so tremendous that they had to lean close, across the narrow table, to hear each other speak. Beth was having the rockfish in pineapple and anchovy sauce, Robert the Thai crab cakes with lemon-grass mayonnaise. Beth was paying.

  “Chess?”

  “Yes. I’m no good now, but I was pretty good when I was little.” Robert wrinkled his nose as he always did when he was being self-deprecating. “Hey, when I was in fourth grade, I was Michigan state champion. I made it to the nationals, but got creamed in the semi-finals by this East Indian kid, from Oxford, Mississippi. Rajiv. I mean, I was nerdy then, but Rajiv was a mega-nerd. He had glasses this thick, all done up with Band-Aids and stuff, and he talked to himself out loud through the games. I think it was having to look at Rajiv over a board for, like, four hours, that made me decide that chess wasn’t really me.”

  Robert framed the word “me” by raising his hands and making bunny-ears with his index and middle fingers. That was another Robert habit—absenting himself from his own words by putting apostrophes around them, though not so often that it was predictable or irritating. Beth rather liked it.

  “Now I’m just a recreational player.”

  “And you play with this guy in Sarajevo every day?”

  “Branko. Most days. Only one game. We meet up on this chess site at eleven in the morning for me, nine at night for him.”

  “How long do these games last?”

  “Not long. Half an hour, forty-five minutes.”

  “I’ve never caught you at it.”

  “That’s my firewall working. My real-time boss scan.”

  “And all this while you’ve been two-timing me!”

  “Everybody needs a little something to take their mind off the Ayatollah. Think of where you’d be without Finn.”

  “The Ayatollah?”

  “The way he buttons his shirts right up to the top. Those suits.”

  “Oh, he’s not so bad. At least he’s not the Geek Messiah.”

  Robert produced an exact, but tactfully muted, imitation of Jeff Bezos’s screeching laugh, which made Beth giggle. Then he held up his hands—mock-arrested—and said, “My fault. I never should’ve mentioned him. But don’t let’s talk about Steve, it’ll wreck our dinner.”

  “Okay. So what’s with your Serbian friend—Branko?”

  “He’s pretty witty.”

  “So you call each other up?”

  “No. I meant his chess. He’s always making moves that make me laugh.”

  “You can be funny in chess?”

  “Oh, yes,” he sounded mildly puzzled. “I’ve never actually talked to him. We just log on.”

  “It sounds like the perfect relationship. Where you just log on.” It occurred to Beth that this was what she and Robert had been doing for the last hour or so. They’d just sort of logged on.

  “Yeah, I was thinking that too. Like Bishop, D3 to C4. King, G8 to H8. Queen, E4 to F4 . . .”

  “Checkmate?”

  “Spassky resigned. That’s Reykjavik in 1972. It’s classic. But you wouldn’t want to have any kind of relationship with Bobby Fischer. Or Spassky.” He laughed. “To be a real chess player, you need to be a serious psycho.”

  For dessert, they split a banana split. As Beth was rearranging the position of her legs in the cramped space below the table, their knees touched. Neither of them nudged or pressed, but neither withdrew. They were not calf to calf, exactly; more, Beth thought, like jean to jean. She wasn’t even totally sure that Robert had noticed.

  When the bill came, he said, “I’d better get going or I’ll miss the bus to Capitol Hill.”

  There was just enough uncertainty in this announcement f
or Beth to say, “You could always crash at my place. It’s right across the street. Finn’s with my ex, so his room’s free—I mean . . . if you wanted . . .”

  Which—shyly, becomingly—he did.

  The police were in the house. Uniformed officers were putting things into transparent plastic bags. They had already taken away Tom’s computer, a Gap Kids catalogue, an envelope of photographs of Finn in the bath. A woman officer was showing a male colleague a book whose title Tom couldn’t see: as she riffled through its pages, graphic disgust registered on the man’s face.

  Tom tried to speak, but terror seemed to have paralysed his vocal cords. All he could manage was a strangulated urrrgh! to which his visitors paid no attention whatsoever as they went on stowing his possessions in evidence-bags.

  Working downwards through the house, they were nearing the end of their search of the second floor, and it was only a matter of time before they found what was hidden in the basement. Tom had lived with the knowledge of its presence, but had told no-one. He hadn’t done it, or, rather, had no memory of doing it, but he’d known about it, and that knowledge would ensure that he would soon be cuffed and driven off in the police van. It had caught up with him, as he supposed he’d always secretly known that it would, and now he was going to be horribly punished.

  An officer pushed past him with a bag full of Finn’s clothes.

  “We’ve got your number, mate,” he said, surprising Tom with his south-of-the-Thames accent. He was wearing a black helmet with a large eight-pointed silver star on the front. As he went on down the stairs, Tom wondered, dully, what a Metropolitan Police constable could be doing here in Seattle.

  That couldn’t be right. A wash of relief flooded through him as he realized he was dreaming. He knew how to escape from bad dreams. You had to take a deep breath and somehow force it past the silencing constriction of your larynx. All it took was an effort of will.

  Policemen were still coming out of his room and Finn’s, bags in hand, but he knew them to be chimeras. Putting his whole being into the attempt, he filled his lungs with air and yelled himself free of the dream.

  He woke to the empty house, the police gone. Yet he was not in bed, as he’d expected, but in the basement. The air smelled sickly-sweet, like putrid fish, and although it was the middle of the night, he was fully dressed. A black, rubber-barrelled flashlight was in his hand. He shone it on the spiderwebs slung between the rafters, the stacked boxes of junk, the murmuring furnace. Bracing himself for what was to come, he stepped past the furnace to the flattened rectangle of earth where Chick had set up his encampment.

  It was there, as he’d known it would be: an untidy parcel, the size of a fat child, wrapped in a dirty blue plastic tarp and tied with coarse garden string. The crinkled tarp, a patchwork of shadows, appeared to have leaked. An irregular dark stain had spread over the dirt on its western side, like a coastline of fjords and promontories. That was new, surely. He squatted on his haunches, shining the flashlight on the ground all around it. The black specks were rat-droppings. Beth had called in a pest-control company a couple of years ago, but the rats must have returned. This close, the stench was unbearable. Tasting vomit, choking it back, he tried to undo the string. The raffia had frayed, and he couldn’t keep the light on the knot. A black rat, wet fur plastered to its body, wriggled out from inside the tarp and scurried into the darkness beyond the furnace.

  Tom screamed. As he woke this time, his hands and knees were scrabbling for purchase on a hard floor that canted violently upwards into the vertical. Groping, he found that he was lying crosswise on the pillows at the head of the bed, face pressed against the wall. The dark bedroom remained connected to the basement by the fading echo of his scream, which must have been loud enough to wake the neighbors and terrify Finn.

  He listened, but no sound came from down the hall. Half in, half out of his dream, he clumsily pulled Beth’s bathrobe around his shoulders and, suffused with dread, stumbled towards Finn’s half-open door.

  In the ghostly blue of the Mr. Moon nightlight, Finn’s body was sprawled across the bed, his cheek snuggled against Squashy Bear, the covers down around his thighs. Holding his own breath, Tom listened for his son’s. He had to hold his good ear close in order to catch it, but there it was—regular, unhindered, like a light wind over water. He pulled up the covers and settled them around Finn’s shoulders. A whiffling noise came from the cardboard wine box beside the bed, so the puppy, too, was still alive.

  He made his way groggily downstairs, where he sat at the kitchen table with his head in his hands. The abundance of life in Finn’s room should have cheered him, but he was not cheered. The stain on the earth, the blue tarp, the knotted string, were hardly further from him now than they’d been in the dream—if indeed he wasn’t dreaming still. The smell was in his nostrils, a rich, cloying odor that you might momentarily mistake for some misbegotten hybrid damask rose. It seemed possible— or at least not impossible—that this was the dream’s third instalment, and he might soon scream himself awake into a further episode, every bit as deceptively solid as the present.

  He had to untie that knot and find out who or what was wrapped in the tarp. The shapeless bundle could as easily hold a fetid slumgullion of butchered parts as a whole body—the torso of one victim, the severed leg of another. If a bit of Hayley Topolski were in there, that was the least of its contents. For all his inattention on that afternoon, he couldn’t feel so utterly, abjectly guilty for whatever it was that had happened to the child, not even in a dream. Finn, then? The family that had died on him—died of his casual neglect, like an unwatered plant? Yes, and yes, but it was more, and worse, than that.

  Innocent people don’t have murderers’ dreams.

  “Daddy?”

  Tom had no idea how long Finn had been standing there. He was holding Squashy Bear. He looked afraid—not the usual night-fright that could be quickly banished by outstretched arms—but afraid of his father. His face, creased with sleep, was feverishly white, his eyes wide. He looked as if he knew.

  “What is it?” Tom’s voice came out as a thirsty croak.

  Before Finn could answer, Squashy Bear began to wriggle and squeal.

  Beth was the first to wake. Not moving a muscle, she watched Robert, or as much of Robert as she could see in the predawn light through her one open eye. His boyish mop of thick albino hair fell in a ragged fringe across his forehead. There was a slight ironic smile on his face, as if his lips knew no other way to settle. Listening to the surf-like sound of early traffic on the Alaskan Way Viaduct, she found the sight of him, without his glasses, entirely beautiful, and felt herself undeserving of the sight: it was like waking to a treat delivered by accident to the wrong person in the wrong room, but no less nice for that. Stealthily, she fished her hand out from under the bedclothes so she could check her watch. It was later than she’d hoped.

  She whispered: “Robert?”

  No response. His eyelashes were albino, too.

  She tried again. “Robert, honey?”

  One eye opened. Then the other. His natural smile enlarged. He appeared wholly, and delightfully, unsurprised to see her.

  She smiled back for a moment, and said, “Remember Chicago?”

  Waxwings

  8.

  “Thomas?”

  The voice at the far end of the line was worn to a throaty whisper.

  “Yes?”

  “Paul Nagel. I got a virus. And some news.” He sounded as if he were calling from his deathbed. “Hayley’s been found.”

  Tom thought, I knew that. He said: “Alive?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “Scumbag reptiles. They buried her in a creek near Moses Lake. Over the mountains. The remains are coming back today.”

  “They?”

  “Man and a woman, if you can call them that, which I wouldn’t want to. Twenties. Caucasian. We got a license number and descriptions. Folks thought they were her parents. Maybe they were relate
d—that’s being checked out now. There’s an uncle in Idaho. She’d been . . . abused.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What’s to be sorry about?” A note of impatient ferocity had entered the whisper. “You’re free and clear. Oh, yeah, you even have a fucking alibi, not that you need it—and I wish to God I didn’t have it neither.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “January one? Oh-nine-hundred? Hayley was in Ellensburg. We have very positive ID on that. She was alive, for fuck’s sake! And where were you, Thomas?”

  “I’ve no—”

  “Of course you wouldn’t. Sorry, I forgot. You were here in this office, talking to me.”