Marathe and Steeply: the soup installment (p. 421)
Causing the chair to squeak, Marathe again rotated two fingers of a hand in the air, which for Québecers signifies impatience. […] The other hand was with the Sterling UL machine pistol beneath the blanket.
Context
The soup installment's chair-squeak, with the standing A.F.R. tableau attached: one hand's gesture causing the squeak, the other on the machine pistol under the blanket. (Two pages later Steeply's list of basic American dreams ends on "[a] tall lemonade on a squeak-free porch swing" — idiom, not extracted, but a neat unwitting antithesis said to a man whose chair squeaks. "Québecers" vs. the text's usual "Québecois" — both carried as written.)