Gargoyles Read Online Free Page B

he’s been waiting all evening to see. Kim’s muscular high-beams violate the whole forest with false daylight then turn into the drive and momentarily hurt his eyes.
    She’s been a long time coming. He wonders how many wrong logging roads were taken, if they fought much, and how difficult she found the sporadic track of beer cans he’d left for her beside the road. He understands that his father didn’t leave any cans.
    The SUV stops behind the pickup midway up the drive, a door opens and but doesn’t close and the beam of Tyler’s reading light bounces toward him — his mother must be running.
    Tyler bets the candles must look pretty eerie from out there. The reading light runs nearer then slows and stops at the biggest window and there is his mother’s face, dim, pressed to the glass. She’s alone and frantic and — compared to the good things going on here in this cabin — of another world.

GARGOYLES
    It’s two or three but he isn’t asleep. Propped on an elbow he peers out his window at the noise. Down on the street, under the street light whose braying he detests, a panel van has inched up to the curb. Under such light it’s hard to tell if the van is silver, or white, or even yellow. He decides to see it as white. He can tell from a sudden lack of something that the van has been turned off. Three men get out. The third one, the driver, trots to catch up to the others, his stomach jiggling in a T-shirt that’s either white or yellow. The driver carries a hammer.
    He lights a candle and turns to his bedside table, the old radio and its parts spread out over the butcher paper. It’s an odd thing to have in a bedroom, but all his work now takes place here. Such a scatter so close to his head while he sleeps — he wonders if it affects his dreams. The radio is from the 1930s or 1940s, and unlike the circuit boards of today has lots of parts. Some of the screws are so small, some of the washers sopaper-thin that he sees himself in a fit of hearty snoring maybe breathing something in. It’s a beautiful old radio, high deco, its shoulders — what would be its shoulders if a radio had shoulders — made of an early plastic, naively but confidently grooved, its colour an attempt at ivory. The radio’s shell and its dissembled parts flicker in the candlelight. It looks rather Frankenstein-like. He doesn’t know what else to do with this radio, how much more he can take it down. He doubts he can get the tubes apart without breaking the glass.
    He wonders what the men outside will think of the radio. Or the project glued onto his bedroom wall — the pocket watch, one of his early dissemblies. Every piece, almost sixty, some so small he can’t see them in this light, stuck to the wall in a pattern that was his best effort at patternlessness. Now he sees fractals. To the two friends who had occasion to see this paste-up he offered the word “installation.” The friends just nodded, and he suffered a dip of dismay that they didn’t know he was joking. As if at seventy-seven he had the arrogance to change careers and say he’s now a visual artist. As if he’d call a childish paste-up “art.” It’s tragic you can get this old and people you call friends don’t know when you’re joking. He wonders what the three men below will see when his dissembled watch falls under their flashlight beams — a starscape? golden snow? — or if it will register in their eyes at all.
    He checks for them out the window. They are behind the rhododendrons, looking up. He doubts they can see him. They look afraid. As they should.
    The dissembling itself was no joke. Taking the watch apart was only serious. He’d chosen such a small object as a challenge to age, had gone out and purchased jeweller’s tools and an eyeglass. He remembers tweezing that first piece, trying not toshake, pulling it gently away