Fifty Degrees Below (43 page)

“I hope.”

She knitted on imperturbably. She had knitted herself pale yellow gloves that left her fingertips free, poking out of the fabric like tree roots. “He lived over in Northeast somewhere. His people may have moved.”

“You don’t think something bad happened to him?”

She shook her head, counting under her breath. “I don’t think so. I’ve been living out for twelve years. Hardly anything bad ever happens. It’s not so much dangerous as it is unhealthy.”

“I suppose so. Don’t you want a place?”

“Sure. But, you know. Wherever you are is a place.”

“If you see Chessman will you tell me?”

“Sure I will. I was gonna do that anyway. I’m curious myself.”

Frank wandered on up Connecticut, looking into the coffee shops and student cafés. He was not reassured by the woman’s words. Thinking about it, he started making calls to people whose whereabouts he did know. The Quiblers were fine, Charlie and Anna working from home, school cancelled, fire in the fireplace. Anna noted that hoarding had begun at the grocery stores and that this was a breakdown in social trust that could be very debilitating to normal supply dynamics. It was starting to happen at gas stations already, lines to tank up, people freezing as they waited, all on their cell phones out stamping their feet. Frank promised to drop by and say hi. Same with the Khembalis, who again offered him a place to stay, despite the crowd. He promised to drop by.

He gave Spencer a call, and the shaman picked up after the first ring. “Hello?”

“Hey why no frisbee, what the hell?”

Spencer laughed appreciatively. “We tried, believe me! But if the disks hit a tree they shatter! We broke a whole bunch of them Monday, although we did establish the low-temperature record, of course. Maybe we should try again.”

“That would be fun. Where are you guys staying, are you keeping warm?”

“Oh yeah, we’re squatting around like always, it’s fine. There’s a place on McKinley just off Nebraska that’s got good insulation and a big fireplace, you should join us, have a meal.”

“Still doing the fregan thing?”

“Sure, it works even better in this cold, the dumpsters are like big freezers.”

“Well maybe I’ll just look for you in the park.”

“Ha ha ha, you chicken. We’ll give you a call next time we go out, give me your cell phone number again.”

Then it was back on the street.

The cold snap had been going on for so long that it had somehow stabilized. Search and rescue had been turned over to the professionals, and Frank didn’t quite know what to do. He could go back in the park, he could drive into the office and do some work, he could go to Optimodal and take a hot shower . . . he stopped himself from thinking about plans. There was a lot to do still in Northwest, surely.

And just as he thought that he saw Cutter, out in the street working on a tree that had split and fallen across three of the four lanes. Frank joined him and offered help that Cutter gladly accepted. As they worked Cutter said that a column of water had evidently filled a crack in the trunk, then frozen and split the tree apart. Frank picked up cut branches and carried them to the pile they had established on the sidewalk. Cutter thanked him without taking an eye off his work. “You seen the park guys?”

“Yeah I ran into them, they appear to be okay.”

Cutter shook his head. “They oughta get a place.”

“No lie. You’ve got a lot of new work like this, I take it?”

“Oh lordy! We should cut down every tree in this city. They all gonna fall on something they not s’pose to.”

“I’m sure. When it’s this cold, will it kill them?”

“Not necessarily. Not except they split open like this.”

“So how do you choose which ones to work on?”

“I drive till I see one in the street.”

“Ha. Is it okay if I help you some more?”

“Of course.”

It was good work, absorbing and warm. Dodge around the work and the cars, never stop moving, get the wood off the street. The chainsaw was loud. It took four people lifting together to get the biggest section of trunk over into the gutter.

Frank stayed with them through the rest of that afternoon. The days were getting a little longer. After a while he felt comfortable enough to say, “You guys shouldn’t wear cotton against the skin, it’s the worst possible stuff for cold.”

“What, are you a vapor barrier man? I hate that shit.”

They were all black. They lived over in Northeast but had worked mostly Northwest when they had worked for City Parks. One of them went on about being from Africa and not capable of handling this kind of cold.

“We’re all from Africa,” Frank said.

“Very true but your people obviously left there before mine did. Your people look to have gone directly to the North Pole.”

“I do like the cold,” Frank admitted.

“Like to die in it.”

That night Frank slept in his van, and rejoined Cutter’s tree crew for the morning, after a dawn walk up and down the park. Deer nibbled unhappily among the snowdrifts; the rest of the animals stuck near the hot boxes. The gibbons looked more and more unhappy, but Nancy said an attempt to capture them had only caused them to swing away through the trees, hooting angrily. The zoo zoologists were thinking of trying to dart them with tranquilizers.

The air temperature remained well below zero, but now there was an almost full load of traffic back on the streets, and a great number of trees and branches to be cleared. More people walked the sidewalks, some bundled up like the Michelin Man. The tree crew put out orange plastic stripping to keep crowds away from their work, especially when things were falling. Frank carried wood. No way did he want to go up in a tree and end up like poor Byron, hollering “My leg my leg. . . .” Chop wood, carry water; chop water, carry wood.

When they took a break for lunch he left them and walked down to see how people were doing in the UDC shelter, and at the Dupont Metro vent. Then back up to the zoo, where many people from FOG and FONZ were still working to capture the ferals. In the zoo enclosures they were reduced to supplementing the regular heating system with weird combinations of battery-powered space heaters to try to keep the enclosures a bit warmer. The animals looked miserable anyway, and quite a few had died.

It was such a busy week that Frank almost forgot when Friday rolled around, until that morning, when it became all he thought about. He ate Friday evening at the Rio Grande, then stood stamping his feet and blowing into his gloved hands at his pay phone in Bethesda.

But no call; and when it was ten after nine, he called Caroline’s number, and let it ring and ring, with never an answer.

What did that mean?

He would find out next Friday, at best. So it seemed. Suddenly their system looked very inadequate. He wanted to talk to her!

Nothing to be done. He tried one last time, listened to the ring. No answer. He had to do something else. He could go to work, or he could . . . no. Just leap. Deflated or not, indecisive or not.

Walking back to his van, he called Diane on his cell phone, as he had every day of the cold snap. She always answered, and her cheery voice held no huge aura of meaning or possibility. She considered that it had been a very good week for the cause. “Everybody knows now that the problem is real. This isn’t like the flood; this could happen three or four times every winter. Abrupt climate change is real, no one can deny it, and it’s a big problem. Things are a mess! So, come on in as soon as they call off the shutdown. There are things we can do.”

“Oh I will,” Frank promised.

But the cold snap went on. The jet stream was running straight south from Hudson Bay. The wind strengthened, and added to every already-existing problem—fire, frostbite, trees down, power lines down. It began to seem like street work and polar emergency services were what he had always done. Get up in the frigid van and drive to get warm. Hike out to the tree house, climb the trunk to pull Miss Piggy up a ways and tack her there on a piton; downclimb, most awkwardly. Scrounge, like a real homeless person, for cold-weather clothing he could give away at the UDC shelter. His own gear at fullest deployment was more than adequate: an old knit hat, a windbreaker shell with a hood, an old Nike ACG (All Conditions Gear, well maybe), a windstopped fleece jacket made of DuPont’s Drylete material, very warm stuff; capilene long underwear and long-sleeved shirt, Insport briefs that had a windstop panel in front, which would also hold a mitten to give his privates extra protection, until the rabbit fur arrived; then some bike shorts with the padding ripped out, some fleece knickerbockers, and then Koch pants, which covered the feet and went up to the waist, though they should have gone higher; Frank couldn’t imagine what Koch had been thinking. Then his low-topped Salomon walking boots and Thorlo synthetic socks, seamless and perfect; he even started putting one of them down the front of his pants instead of a mitten. Very rabbit-fur–like. And low-topped gaiters to keep the snow out of his boots, stylish, like black spats. Over all that, on windy days, a jacket that went down to the thighs, and covered the hands and stuck out far beyond the face; a baseball hat to keep snow off the face, help with sun in eyes. Ski gloves, snowshoes, and ski poles.

Frank could not be more set; he was probably the best-dressed man in the city. He was the Alpine man, come back to life! And his goal, Johnny Appletentlike, was to get everybody else living out-of-doors into gear that was at least adequate. Into shelters at night if the cold was too much. It was no easy task, because it called not only for acquisition of gear that was disappearing fast from all the thrift shops (though people didn’t recognize wool, apparently), but the money to fund it. He used a grant from the zoo’s feral fund, among other things, considering that with that name it was not even a case of reprogrammed funds. But the distribution of the gear could be tricky. No one liked gratitude, but many people were cold enough to take what he gave them. Cotton and cardboard were no longer hacking it. The stubborn ones were likely to die. The newspapers reported that a few hundred already had. Frank could scarcely believe some of the stories in the
Post
about the dumb things people had done and were still doing. They could be six inches from safety and not recognize it. It was as John Muir had said of the Donner Party; a perfectly fine winter base camp, botched by ineptitude. But they didn’t know. It was a technique, and if you didn’t have it you died. It wasn’t rocket science but it was mandatory.

Frank had to be careful not to get careless himself. He stayed out all day every day, and part of him was beginning to think he had it wired, so that he spent longer sessions out. Sometimes he discovered he was so ravenous or thirsty that he was going to keel over; he blew into the coffee shops shivering hard, only to discover white patches on his chin, and fiendishly pinpricking fingers and ears. God knew what was happening to his poor nose. Emergency infusions of hot chocolate, then, blowing across the top and burning his mouth to gulp some down, burning his esophagus, feeling his insides burning while his extremities fizzed with cold. Hot chocolate was the perfect start on a return to proper heat and energy. Cinnamon rolls too; he was coming to believe that cinnamon was a powerful stimulant and that it also allowed him to see better in the black-and-white of his dawn and dusk patrols. Shifting dapple under cloudy moonlight, it didn’t matter to him now, he saw the structure of Washington, D.C., and Rock Creek Park underneath all that chiaroscuro, high on the magic spice.

One night he found the bros back in the park, around a very hospitable bonfire. Just outside the light the body of a deer lay partly skinned, steaks hacked out of its flank.

“—so fucking cold it made me stupid.”

“Like that’s what did it.”

“—I couldn’t even talk for a couple days. Like my tongue was froze. Then I could talk, but I only knew like ten words.”

“That happened to me,” Fedpage put in. “I started talking in old English, and then German. You know,
’Esh var kalt.’
The Germans really know how to say it. And then it was just grunts and moans for a while. ‘
Fur esh var
kallllt.’ ”

“You’re funny Fedpage. You were wasted in Vietnam.”

“I was indeed wasted in Vietnam.”

Fluctuating radiant pulses of heat washed over their faces.

Frank sat by the fire and watched it burn. “So you guys really were in Vietnam.”

“Of course.”

“You must be pretty old then.”

“We are pretty old then! Fuck you. How the fuck old are you?”

“Forty-three.”

“What a kid.”

“We’re twice as old as that, kid. No wonder your nose bleeds.”

“In point of fact I’m fifty-eight,” said Fedpage.

“Boomer scum.”

“Yeah, he went to the University of Vietnam.”

“So what was it like?”

“It was fucked! What do you think?”

“At least it wasn’t cold,” Zeno said dourly. “It might have been fucked but at least you didn’t freeze your dick off.”

“I told you to put a sock down there.”

“Put a sock on it! Good idea!”

Fedpage, solemn, calculating: “I would need one of them knee socks.”

General mirth. Discussion of burning needle sensation during penile thawing. Listing of exceptional cases of genital trauma. Frank watched Zeno brood. Zeno noticed and snapped, “It was fucked, man.”

“It was everything,” Fedpage said.

“That’s true. It was every kind of thing. There were some guys over there who joined up specifically to kill people. Some people were like that. But most of them weren’t, and for them it was hell. They didn’t know what hit them. We just did what we were told and tried to stay alive.”

“Which we did.”

“But we were lucky! It was sheer dumb luck. When we were in Danang we could just as easily been over-run.”

“What happened there?” Frank said.

“We got caught by the Tet offensive—”

“He don’t know about any of that. We were cut off, okay? We were surrounded in a town and we got hammered. They killed a lot of us and they would have killed all of us except the Air Force made some passes. Bombed the shit out of those NVA.”