Waxwings

by Unknown

  “Walkies?”

  He thought he saw a flicker of response in her mud-colored eyes. She submitted to having the leash clipped to her collar, and waddled, almost amiably, to the front door.

  On the street, Tom felt ridiculous. He might as well have been towing a toy duck on wheels—except that Sugar’s wheels seized up at regular intervals, and he’d hear the rasp of paws on concrete as he dragged the puppy’s dead weight behind him. “Sugar!” he kept muttering, sotto voce. “Sugar, no!” Though “Sugar” didn’t appear to register with her, there were a couple of occasions when she looked up enquiringly at the word no as if that were her true name.

  He scuffed his heels and stared at the sky while she buried her nose in cracks in the sidewalk. He yanked her away from piles of unscooped dogshit. The walk to the market took on the epic dimensions of an Oregon Trail as Tom grew hungry and the puppy flagged. Though Ken’s was in sight, it appeared to be receding over the far horizon. For the last four blocks, Sugar had to be portaged. He tied her to the ice-machine outside the store, where she sank into a comatose brown heap.

  He came out with his shopping a few minutes later, and found a dog transformed. She was straining at the end of her lead, tongue lolling, tail throbbing, her stunted forelegs bicycling in air.

  The woman who was crouched in front of her looked up. “You don’t mind if I pet her? What’s her name?”

  “Shoo-gar,” Tom said in unthinking mimicry of Finn.

  “Oh, cool. Chinese. Siu Ga! Siu Ga!”

  The dog pranced from foot to foot, panting so frantically that Tom thought she might drop dead of a spontaneous explosion of the heart.

  “It’s not mine,” he was quick to say. “It’s my four-year-old’s.”

  “She’s such a cutey. You have a boy or a girl?”

  “Boy.” The woman reminded him alarmingly of Beth—not Beth now, but as she’d been in the days before she went off to work for Steve Litvinof. They had in common a black leather bomber-jacket, slim hips, fair hair, and a nice asymmetrical smile, higher on the left than on the right. Not much, but enough to disconcert.

  “Hey, I know who you are . . .”

  She was scrutinizing him. How many milliseconds would it take, he wondered, for her to make the connection?

  “You’re Tom Janeway.”

  “Yes.”

  But she was still smiling.

  “I’ve heard you on NPR. And I read your book . . . Corridors?”

  “Tunnels.”

  “That’s right, Tunnels.”

  Amazing.

  “My husband gave it to me for Christmas one year. I’m a big Dickens fan. You want to know the part I really loved? When you had Quilp putting the moves on Becky Sharp and getting hauled off by General William Booth. That was hysterical.”

  “Ah, you must be in the trade,” Tom said. “Teacher? Or just finishing up your Ph.D.?”

  “Me? No, I’m in marketing.”

  That was the line he liked best.

  Walking back along Sixth Avenue, Tom appraised the dog with different eyes. He had to admit she had a certain skewed and low-slung charm. Obviously a social asset, she might yet prove the means of his reintroduction to the world. If her desire was to stop by a cherry tree, sniff shit, and eat grass, that was fine by him.

  They were just passing Garfield when a car slowed beside them, its electric passenger window rolling down. “Hi, Tom! Hi, Siu Ga!” Then she accelerated away.

  It was an encounter blessedly without consequence. The woman was married; and even if she hadn’t been, her unsettling likeness to Beth would have put her safely out of bounds. But the uncomplicated airiness of their exchange gave him an inkling, a glimmer, of a life still hidden from his view, and it was pleasant to think of how the woman would never know the meaning of the gift she’d so casually bestowed on him.

  On a flying visit to the house, Beth looked wrecked, her eyes sunk in sleepless violet bruises. “I can’t stay long,” she said as she came through the door.

  Finn introduced her to Siu Ga.

  “Oh, look at her. She’s so cute!” To Tom she said: “Has it had its shots?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “You ought to take it to the vet’s. Like, tomorrow. I mean, where did your Chinese guy get it from? It probably has—well, god knows what. Distemper? Worms? Ear-lice? It could have rabies.”

  “Well, she’s bitten me a couple of times, and so far I’m not foaming at the mouth.”

  “You’ll have to keep it here. There’s a no-pets rule in my building.”

  “You could always take her to work . . .”

  Beth scowled. “I thought you hated dogs.”

  “Well, I seem to be coming round to this one.”

  Turning away from Finn, Beth whispered, “It’s incredibly ugly.”

  “She grows on you. By degrees.”

  “Better you than me. Oh, pumpkin—she’s having an accident. On the kitchen floor.”

  Finn had grown adept with the sandwich bags, and cleaned it up with proprietorial pride.

  “It was on the paper, almost,” he announced. “She’s nearly paper-trained.” The Dog in Your Life had supplanted Mister Wicked stories at bedtime, and the puppy was already sitting on Finn’s command. Or so he claimed.

  “How’s Chicago?”

  “What? Oh, it’s a nightmare. The opening got pushed back three weeks, and Steve’s losing it. Have you seen what’s been happening to the stock?”

  “No.”

  “It’s all over the place. Yesterday it looked like it was going into free fall. Then it recovered. The CFO keeps on sending out don’t-panic messages, which of course just adds to the general hysteria. Lots of crazy rumors are going around . . .”

  Yet Beth’s tone was detached, even amused. Tom was tempted to mention 1720, and the South Sea Bubble, but remembered the last time he’d raised that subject, and said, “Rumors of what?”

  “Oh, you know—lay-offs, downsizing, mergers. Steve flew to San Francisco last week, and everybody got paranoid. There’s a Silicon Valley company called RealWorld . . . I heard we’d definitely been sold. But it turned out to be a family funeral. If Steve goes to the bathroom now, that starts another rumor.”

  “Are you getting any sleep at all?”

  Beth squinted at him, as if he’d said something odd. “Not much. It’s like they say—twenty-four/seven.”

  “Can you stay for supper?”

  “Uh-uh. I promised I’d be back in the office by eight, and I sort of ate already. Thanks, though.”

  “Are you sure it’s worth it?”

  “What?” She gave him that funny, sharp look again.

  “This . . . life you’re leading. You look flat-out exhausted.”

  “It’s just temporary,” she said. “Just till Chicago.”

  She played with Finn and the puppy for twenty minutes, then left.

  Finn looked up and said: “My mom really, really loved Sugar.”

  Chick was on a stepladder painting the pillars, the radio going at his feet. He’d wanted to use white, but the American insisted on this ugly green, an offense for which he’d make him pay. But he liked painting— the good smell of it, the feel of the loaded brush in his hand, the lavish unrolling of color on the gray. He was lost in his work, cocooned in music, when he heard a voice shout “Mr. Lee?”

  Chick plotted a route of escape before looking away from his pillar. A short bald man in a yellow coat, with highly polished brown shoes, stood on the porch steps. He looked too rich to be an official, but he carried a leather document case. The car parked under the tree was a black BMW—no logo on it, and with private plates. “What you want?”

  “Home improvements!” the man shouted, then pointed at the radio. “Can we talk?”

  Chick put the brush down, lowered the volume of the music, and waved the man imperiously back. “Wet paint!”

  “Excuse me.” The man retreated to the edge of the sidewalk, from where he had to speak with face upturned and rais
ed voice raised. “I called Donald Dahlberg, who said I’d probably find you here.”

  How did Mr. Don know this? “You friend of him?”

  “No, I just talked to him on the phone.”

  “Where you work?”

  “I’m an attorney.” The man reached into an inside pocket and produced a business card, which he held out as bait. “My name’s Hamish McTurk.” He began to step forward, but Chick held up his hand, palm outward, like a traffic cop.

  “What you want?” Though small, the man looked strong, and had a fighter’s lumpy potato-face. Chick decided to change his route: through the front door and out the back.

  “Oh, I just dropped by on the off-chance . . . Hey, I’m only the gofer here, but I’ve got a client down in Galveston. Texas, you know? More a friend than a client, really. He’s in the energy business.”

  “What you want?”

  “Mr. Lee? You think maybe we could find some place to talk? Go get a coffee together, or just sit in the car? Five minutes is all it would take.”

  Chick was encouraged by the uncertain, experimental look of the attorney’s smile. “Talk for why?”

  “Your steam barge?”

  “Not for sale,” Chick said, watching the man closely.

  “No, of course not.” The attorney laughed, a thin, cracked whoop. “No, he was thinking charter. Short term. Per diem. A temporary arrangement. Any chance there’s an open slot on your schedule?”

  Chick moved to the side of the deck and nodded at the open front door.

  As the attorney set foot on the steps, he said, “Don Dahlberg said it had just changed hands.” Then, once he had his head inside the door: “Nice house!”

  Taking care to stay behind him, Chick pointed through the living room toward the kitchen.

  “Always wanted to go to China. Never made it, though. Now the Great Wall—that’s something I’d love to see. Have you visited the Forbidden City? The Silk Road? Friend of mine at the office, he and his wife took a cruise down the Yangtze, and said it was fabulous. I was looking at the photos just the other day. Great country.”

  Chick had forgotten about the dog. It was squealing inside its crate on the kitchen floor. The crate shook, claws scrabbled, bits of brown fur showed against the ventilation slats, followed by a single wild eye. The attorney looked at the crate, grinned, opened his mouth to speak, but was forestalled by a shrilling howl. Chick kicked the shuddering crate several inches across the linoleum.The dog whimpered once and went quiet.

  “You got to admire a people like that. I mean, think of the things you guys invented. Gunpowder. The umbrella. The magnetic compass. I’m a sailor, of course, so I like to dabble in maritime law. I do criminal, family, immigration . . . That’s the bread-and-butter side. But what I really like to do is maritime. What part of China are you from, Mr. Lee?”

  Chick pointed at a chair.

  The attorney unbuttoned his coat and seated himself at the table. “I love to travel. I got to get over to China some day. That’s one promise I really mean to keep.”

  Leaning against the stove, arms folded, feet planted wide, Chick watched the attorney spring the locks of his document case, and saw his eyes glance nervously at the crate.

  “And that’s another thing—the cooking. You got one of the top cuisines in the world. If not the top. Couple I was telling you about? They say they ate like kings around the clock.”

  “What you want with steam barge?”

  The man riffled through his folders and pulled out a single printed sheet. “You know the Orinoco Delta, Mr. Lee? You been to Venezuela? My Galveston friend’s out there now. All shallow water and mangroves. What he liked about the sound of your vessel is the draft. Six feet, right? He had a notion it might just work, but it’s no big deal to him. Hell, he’s probably got a dozen people looking at steam barges for him right this minute.”

  “Why he want?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Why he want!” At the sound of Chick’s raised voice, the dog began to wail again.

  “Well, I hardly need to explain to you—”

  “Why he want steam in Venezuela?”

  “Oh, I see what you’re getting at. I don’t believe they’ve got the same viscosity problem on other fields. Just on this one. Funny, isn’t it? You’d think in that kind of equatorial climate—”

  “You tell why!” His hands were bunched into fists.

  “You mean—well, as I understand it, which probably is a whole lot less than you do, the oil down there’s like Jell-O. Just won’t pump. I don’t know why I’m having to say this, Mr. Lee, but you got to fill that whole reservoir down there with steam—right?—so the oil heats up and thins, and ‘Thar she blows!’ ” The attorney looked emptied by this explanation, emptied and sick.

  Chick imagined the swampy brown water, the mangroves, the mosquitoes, the congealed oil, the tall skinny frame of the rig, the seesawing pumps. Without a steam barge . . . At last the great gray boiler-house with its chimneys, pipes, and walkways had a real purpose. Mr. Don’s big-money dreams made sense now.

  “You want day-rental for Venezuela?” Chick laughed, enjoying the attorney’s humiliation.

  “Well, if the price was right, I guess he might conceivably . . . But you say it’s not for sale, so—”

  “You show me.” Chick pointed to the piece of paper. The attorney passed it to him: a muddy photocopy of a page torn from a ship-magazine. October 1998. The ad for the steam barge took up the bottom half of the page: a picture, mostly black, of the barge being towed by a tugboat, a paragraph of technical details, and Mr. Don’s name, address, and phone number. Chick had hoped to see a price, but that was something people in the marine business would know without being told.

  “Have any of the specs changed?”

  “No change. All same.”

  “I could try calling my friend from the car, if you’d like, just to see if he’s still looking . . .”

  “You watch out. Wet paint!”

  Twice the attorney went outside to his car, returning each time with questions, and an expression that was hard to figure. Chick made a call of his own, to Mr. Qiu. Over the next half hour a price for the steam barge was negotiated—$379,000, subject to survey, and payable within four days by banker’s draft. The number was too low, Chick knew, and he was at first affronted, but then agreed, sullenly, with a nod and a grunt. At least this poor deal would further anger Mr. Don if he were ever to learn the terms of the sale. If Mr. Don had sold the steam barge, he would’ve got $500,000, minimum, which made the whole thing even funnier.

  The attorney drove away just as the American pulled up, his old Volkswagen rattling into the space vacated by the new BMW. Chick turned up the volume of the radio before the American got out, and when he stood under the tree, a pile of books in his arms, looking up at the porch, Chick pretended not to see him, and laid another swath of paint onto the primer.

  Later in the afternoon, when he stopped by the shipyard, Mr. Don’s pick-up was gone.

  “He go to Vancouver,” Lázaro said. “Buy a ship. Not back till Monday. Hey, this morning he say EPA come looking for you.”

  “Yeah. The fuck tell him where I do work.” He looked down the dock to the steam barge and laughed. “Wah!” He spat into the asphalt. “Fuck set me up.”

  On Sunday morning, Tom was in his eyrie at the top of the house, trying to draft a letter to David Scott-Rice. He’d got as far as Dear David, I, but the last ten minutes had been spent wondering how to proceed from there. From the second-floor landing came the sounds of obedience-training—Finn shouting “No!” and “Bad dog!” in his deep Santa Claus voice, the puppy answering with a volley of yips and barks.

  Tom back-spaced on the I and typed: Your first impulse will be to shoot the messenger, but

  A ferry was crossing to Bainbridge Island, trailing a long skirt of ripples behind it in the windless gray.

  I’ve talked to the department chairman, and

  “Sugar, no! No, no, no!”
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  “Finbow,” Tom called. “Cool your jets, please. Or take her downstairs.”

  I’m afraid the university is going to take the line that