‘Unless it is too late,’ Edgardo suggested.
Diane had said the same thing to Frank in private, but now she said firmly, ‘Let’s proceed on the assumption that it is never too late. I mean, here we are. So let’s get Sophie in, and prepare something for the White House and the congressional committees. Some plans. Things we can do right now, concerning both the Gulf Stream and global warming more generally.’
‘We’ll need to scare the shit out of them,’ Edgardo said.
‘Yes. Well, the marks of the flood are still all over town. That should help.’
‘People are already fond of the flood,’ Edgardo said. ‘It was an adventure. It got people out of their ruts.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Diane said, with a grimace that was still somehow cheerful or amused. Scaring politicians might be something she looked forward to.
Given all that he had to do at work, Frank didn’t usually get away as early as he would have liked. But the June days were long, and with the treehouse finished there was no great rush to accomplish any particular task. Once in the park, he could wander up the West Ridge Trail and choose where to drop deeper to the east, looking for animals. Just north of Military Road the trail ran past the high point of the park, occupied by the site of Fort DeRussey, now low earthen bulwarks. One evening he saw movement inside the bulwarks, froze: some kind of antelope, its russet coloring not unlike the mounded earth, its neck stretched as it pulled down a branch with its mouth to strip off leaves. White stripes running diagonally up from its white belly. An exotic for sure. A feral from the zoo, and his first nondescript!
It saw him, and yet continued to eat. Its jaw moved in a rolling, side-to-side mastication; the bottom jaw was the one that stayed still. It was alert to his movements, and yet not skittish. He wondered if there were any general feral characteristics, if escaped zoo animals were more trusting or less than the local natives. Something to ask Nancy.
Abruptly the creature shot away through the trees. It was big! Frank grinned, pulled out his FOG phone and called it in. The cheap little cell phone was on something like a walkie-talkie or party line system, and Nancy or one of her assistants usually picked up right away. ‘Sorry, I don’t really know what it was.’ He described it the best he could. Pretty lame, but what could he do? He needed to learn more. ‘Call Clark on phone 12,’ Nancy suggested, ‘he’s the ungulate guy.’ No need to GPS the sighting, being right in the old fort.
He hiked down the trail that ran from the fort to the creek, paralleling Military Road and then passing under its big bridge, which had survived but was still closed. It was nice and quiet in the ravine, with Beach Drive gone and all the roads crossing the park either gone or closed for repairs. A sanctuary.
Green light in the muggy late afternoon. He kept an eye out for more animals, thinking about what might happen to them in the abrupt climate change Kenzo said they were now entering. All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps devastated. That was what they were saying, really, when they talked about the impact on humans: they would lose the support of the domesticated part of nature. Everything would become an exotic; everything would have to go feral.
He walked south on a route that stayed on the rim of the damaged part of the gorge as much as possible. When he came to site 21 he found the homeless guys there as usual, sitting around looking kind of beat.
‘Hey, Doc! Why aren’t you playing frisbee? They ran by just a while ago.’
‘Did they? Maybe I’ll catch them on their way back.’
Frank regarded them; hanging around in the steamy sunset, smoking in their own fire, empties dented on the ground around them. Frank found he was thirsty, and hungry.
‘Who’ll eat pizza if I go get one?’
Everyone would. ‘Get some beer too!’ Zeno said, with a hoarse laugh that falsely insinuated this was a joke.
Frank hiked out to Connecticut and bought thin-crusted pizzas from a little stand across from Chicago’s. He liked them because he thought the owner of the stand was mocking the thick pads of dough that characterized the pizzas in the famous restaurant. Frank was a thin-crust man himself.
Back into the dusky forest, two boxes held like a waiter. Then pizza around the fire, with the guys making their usual desultory conversation. The vet always studying the Post’s federal news section did indeed appear well-versed in the ways of the federal bureaucracy, and he definitely had a chip on his shoulder about it. ‘The left hand don’t know what the right one is doing,’ he muttered again. Frank had already observed that they always said the same things; but didn’t everybody? He finished his slice and crouched down to tend their smoky fire. ‘Hey someone’s got potatoes burning in here.’
‘Oh yeah, pull those out! You can have one if you want.’
‘Don’t you know you can’t cook no potato on no fire?’
‘Sure you can! How you do think?’
Frank shook his head; the potato skins were charred at one end, green at the other. Back in the paleolithic there must have been guys hanging out somewhere beyond the cave, guys who had offended the alpha male or killed somebody by accident or otherwise fucked up – or just not been able to understand the rules – or failed to find a mate (like Frank) – and they must have hunkered around some outlier fire, eating lukewarm pizza and making crude chitchat that was always the same, laughing at their old jokes.
‘I saw an antelope up in the old fort,’ he offered.
‘I saw a tapir,’ the Post reader said promptly.
‘Come on Fedpage, how you know it was a tapir.’
‘I saw that fucking jaguar, I swear.’
Frank sighed. ‘If you report it to the zoo, they’ll put you in their volunteer group. They’ll give you a pass to be in the park.’
‘You think we need a pass?’
‘We be the ones giving them a pass!’
‘They’ll give you a cell phone too.’ That surprised them.
Chessman slipped in, glancing at Frank, and Frank nodded unenthusiastically; he had been about to leave. And it was his turn to play black. Chessman set out the board between them and moved out his king’s pawn.
Suddenly Zeno and Andy were arguing over ownership of the potatoes. It was a group that liked to argue. Zeno was among the worst of these; he would switch from friendly to belligerent within a sentence, and then back again. Abrupt climate change. The others were more consistent. Andy was consistently abrasive with his unfunny humor, but friendly. Fedpage was always shaking his head in disgust at something he was reading. The silent guy with the silky dark red beard was always subdued, but when he spoke always complained, often about the police. Another regular was older, with faded blond-gray hair, pockmarked face, not many teeth. Then there was Jory, an olive-skinned skinny man with greasy black hair and a voice that sounded so much like Zeno’s that Frank at first confused them when listening to their chat. He was if anything even more volatile than Zeno, but had no friendly mode, being consistently obnoxious and edgy. He would not look at Frank except in sidelong glances that radiated hostility.
Lastly among the regulars was Cutter, a cheery, bulky black guy, who usually arrived with a cut of meat to cook on the fire, always providing a pedigree for it in the form of a story of petty theft or salvage. Adventures in food acquisition. He often had a couple of buddies with him, knew Chessman, and appeared to have a job with the city park service, judging by his shirts and his stories. He more than the others reminded Frank of his window-washing days, also the climbing crowd – a certain rowdy quality – life considered as one outdoor sport after the next. It seemed as if Cutter had somewhere else as his base; and he had also