Waxwings by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

Waxwings

6.

The house shook to the thunder of construction. A diagonal shaft of sunshine, radiant with dust, fell through the new glass of the window on the stairs and reached the Christmas tree, which stood in a litter of browning needles and fallen ornaments, some in jagged silver smithereens. The contractor had removed the front door from its hinges, and chilly gusts of wind from outside added wood-shavings and sycamore leaves to the swirls of drifting paper. The disembodied talking heads of Chick, Lázaro, and Jesús were visible at floor-level in the doorway like characters in a glove-puppet show, yammering at one another in an acrimonious Babel of English, Spanish, and Chinese over the unearthly ensemble of sledgehammers and saws.

“Enano!”

“Besa mi culo!”

“Yo’ fuck!”

Tom hid the butterfly paperweight behind a great black-backed poetry anthology by Louis Untermeyer—surely no temptation there— and bicycled off to Ken’s Market. He returned to the house in time to hear Chick utter a sentence that sounded like the battle cry of a wounded tomcat in a rooftop territorial dispute. Shrugging himself into his old winter overcoat, he set off in the Volkswagen in search of peace and quiet.

He was crossing the grating of the Fremont Bridge when the conversation with Beth began. She seemed to be riding beside him in the car, a sullen storm-cloud in the unseasonable brightness of the morning. She was so unjust. He shifted from second into third with an abrupt swipe that made the gearbox shriek.

“Sorry,” he said. Then, “Look . . .”

He drove on, wrangling with her silently through the stop-and-go traffic. As he swung right on to the Lake City Way exit from I-5, he said aloud, “I never dreamed you would turn out to be so bloody shallow.”

The city frayed out into the ugly suburbs, the flag-bedecked car dealerships, strip malls, lumber-yards, Taco Bells, and martial-arts studios rendered still uglier by the unforgiving sunshine. Meanwhile, Beth—that spoiled ingrate—goaded him from the passenger seat.

“You never once bothered . . .” he said. “You might have had the common decency to . . .”

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

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