Fifty Degrees Below

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Having grown up in southern California, Frank could never get used to this array. These days he was fondest of the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean cuisines, and this area of Northwest was rich in both, so that he had to think about which one he wanted, and whether to eat in or do take-out. Eating alone in a restaurant he would have to have something to read. Funny how reading in a restaurant was okay, while watching a laptop or talking on a cell phone was not. Actually, judging by the number of laptops visible in the taverna at the corner of Connecticut and Brandywine, that custom had already changed. Maybe they were reading from their laptops. That might be okay. He would have to try it and see how it felt.

  He decided to do take-out. It was dinner time but there was still lots of light left to the day; he could take a meal out into the park and enjoy the sunset. He walked on Connecticut until he came on a Greek restaurant that would put dolmades and calamari in paper boxes, with a dill yogurt sauce in a tiny plastic container. Too bad about the ouzo and retsina, only sold in the restaurant; he liked those tastes. He ordered an ouzo to drink while waiting for his food, downing it before the ice cubes even got a chance to turn it milky.

  Back on the street. The taste of licorice enveloped him like a key signature, black and sweet. Steamy dusk of spring, hazed with blossom dust. Sweatslipping past two women; something in their sudden shared laughter set him to thinking about his woman from the elevator. Would she call? And if so, when? And what would she say, and what would he say? A licorish mood, an anticipation of lust, like a wolf whistle in his mind. Vegetable smell of the flood. The two women had been so beautiful. Washington was like that.

  The food in his paper sack was making him hungry, so he turned east and walked into Rock Creek Park, following a path that eventually brought him to a pair of picnic tables, bunched at one end of a small bedraggled lawn. A stone fireplace like a little charcoal oven anchored the ensemble. The muddy grass was uncut. Birch and sycamore trees overhung the area. There had been lots of picnic areas in the park, but most had been located down near the creek and so presumably had been washed away. This one was set higher, in a little hollow next to Ross Drive. All of them, Frank recalled, used to be marked by big signs saying CLOSED AT DUSK. Nothing like that remained now. He sat at one of the tables, opened up his food.

  He was about halfway through the calamari when several men tromped into the glade and sat at the other table or stood before the stone fireplace, bringing with them a heavy waft of stale sweat, smoke, and beer. Worn jackets, plastic bags: homeless guys.

  Two of them pulled beer cans out of a paper grocery bag. A grizzled one in fatigues saluted Frank with a can. “Hey man.”

  Frank nodded politely. “Evening.”

  “Want a beer?”

  “No thanks.”

  “What’s a matter?”

  Frank shrugged. “Sure, why not.”

  “Yar. There ya go.”

  Frank finished his dolmades and drank the offered Pabst Blue Ribbon, watching the men settle around him. His benefactor and two of the others were dressed in the khaki camouflage fatigues that signified Vietnam Vet Down On Luck (Your Fault, Give Money). Sure enough, a cardboard sign with a long story scrawled in felt-tip on it protruded from one of their bags.

  Next to the three vets, a slight man with a dark red beard and ponytail sat on the table. The other three men were black, one of these a youth or even a boy. They sat down at Frank’s table. The youngster unpacked a box that contained a chess set, chessboard, and timer. The man who had offered Frank a beer came over and sat down across from the youth as he set the board. The pieces were cheap plastic, but the timer looked more expensive. The two started a game, the kid slapping the plunger on his side of the timer down after pauses averaging about fifteen seconds, while the vet usually depressed his with a slow touch, after a minute or more had passed, always declaring “Ah fuck.”

  “Want to play next?” the boy asked Frank. “Bet you five dollars.”

  “I’m not good enough to play for money.”

  “Bet you that box of squid there.”

  “No way.” Frank ate on while they continued. “You guys aren’t playing for money,” he observed.

  “He already took all I got,” the vet said. “Now I’m like pitching him batting practice. He’s dancing on my body, the little fucker.”

  The boy shook his head. “You just ain’t paying attention.”

  “You wore me out, Chessman. You’re beating me when I’m down. You’re a fucking menace. I’m setting up my sneak attack.”

  “Checkmate.”

  The other guys laughed.

  Then three men ran into their little clearing. “Hi guys!” they shouted as they hustled to the far end of the site.

  “What the hell?” Frank said.

  The big vet guffawed. “It’s the frisbee players!”

  “They’re always running,” one of the other vets explained. He wore a VFW baseball cap and his face was dissolute and whiskery. He shouted to the runners: “Hey who’s winning!”

  “The wind!” one of them replied.

  “Evening, gentlemen,” another said. “Happy Thursday.”

  “Is that what it is?”

  “Hey who’s winning? Who’s winning?”

  “The wind is winning. We’re all winning.”

  “That’s what you say! I got my money on you now! Don’t you let me down now!”

  The players faced a fairway of mostly open air to the north.

  “What’s your target?” Frank called.

  The tallest of them had blue eyes, gold-red dreadlocks, mostly gathered under a bandanna, and a scraggly red-gold beard. He was the one who had greeted the homeless guys first. Now he paused and said to Frank, “The trashcan, down there by that light. Par four, little dogleg.” He took a step and made his throw, a smooth uncoiling motion, and then the others threw and they were off into the dusk.

  “They run,” the second vet explained again.

  “Running frisbee golf?”

  “Yeah some people do it that way. Rolfing they call it, running golf. Not these guys though! They just run without no name for it. They don’t always use the regular targets either. There’s some baskets out here, they’re metal things with chains hanging from them. You got to hit the chains and the frisbees fall in a basket.”

  “Except they don’t,” the first vet scoffed.

  “Yeah it’s a finicky sport. Like fucking golf, you know.”

  Down the path Frank could see the runners picking up their frisbees and stopping for only a moment before throwing again.

  “How often do they come here?”

  “A lot!”

  “You can ask them, they’ll be back in a while. They run the course forward and back.”

  They sat there, once or twice hearing the runners call out. Fifteen minutes later the men did indeed return, on the path they had left.

  Frank said to the dreadlocked one, “Hey, can I follow you and learn the course?”

  “Well sure, but we do run it, as you see.”

  “Oh yeah that’s fine, I’ll keep up.”

  “Sure then. You want a frisbee to throw?”

  “I’d probably lose it.”

  “Always possible out here, but try this one. I found it today, so it must be meant for you.”

  “Okay.”

  Like any other climber, Frank had spent a fair amount of camp time tossing a frisbee back and forth. He much preferred it to hackysack, which he was no good at. Now he took the disk they gave him and followed them to their next tee, and threw it last, conservatively, as his main desire was to keep it going straight up the narrow fairway. His shot only went half as far as theirs, but he could see where it had crashed into the overgrown grass, so he considered it a success, and ran after the others. They were pretty fast, not sprinting but moving right along, at what Frank guessed was about a seven-minute–mile pace if they kept it up; and they slowed only briefly to pick up their frisbees and throw them again. It quickly became appar
ent that the slowing down, throwing, and starting up again cost more energy than running straight through would have, and Frank had to focus on the work of it. The players pointed out the next target, and trusted he would not clock them in the backs of their heads after they threw and ran off. And in fact if he shot immediately after them he could fire it over their heads and keep his shot straight.

  Some of the targets were trash cans, tree trunks, or big rocks, but most were metal baskets on metal poles, the poles standing chest high and supporting chains that hung from a ring at the top. Frank had never seen such a thing before. The frisbee had to hit the chains in such a way that its momentum was stopped and it fell in the basket. If it bounced out it was like a rimmer in golf or basketball, and a put-in shot had to be added to one’s score.

  One of the players made a putt from about twenty yards away, and they all hooted. Frank saw no sign they were keeping score or competing. The dreadlocked player threw and his frisbee too hit the chains, but fell to the ground. “Shit.” Off they ran to pick them up and start the next hole. Frank threw an easy approach shot, then tossed his frisbee in.

  “What was par there?” he asked as he ran with them.

  “Three. They’re all threes but three, which is a two, and nine, which is a four.”

  “There’s nine holes?”

  “Yes, but we play the course backward too, so we have eighteen. Backward they’re totally different.”

  “I see.”

  So they ran, stopped, stooped, threw, and took off again, chasing the shots like dogs. Frank got into his running rhythm, and realized their pace was more the equivalent of an eight- or nine-minute mile. He could run with these guys, then. Throwing was another matter, they were amazingly strong and accurate; their shots had a miraculous quality, flying right to the baskets and often crashing into the chains from quite a distance.

  “You guys are good!” he said at one tee.

  “It’s just practice,” the dreadlocked one said. “We play a lot.”

  “It’s our religion,” one of the others said, and his companions cackled as they made their next drives.

  Then one of Frank’s own approach shots clanged into the chains and dropped straight in, from about thirty yards out. The others hooted loudly in congratulation.

  On his next approach he focused on throwing at the basket, let go, watched it fly straight there and hit with a resounding clash of the chains. A miracle! A glow filled him, and he ran with an extra bounce in his step.

  At the end of their round they stood steaming in the dusk, not far from the picnic area and the homeless guys. The players compared numbers, “twenty-eight,” “thirty-three,” which turned out to be how many strokes under par they were for the day. Then high fives and handshakes, and they began to move off in different directions.

  “I want to do that again,” Frank said to the dreadlocked guy.

  “Any time, you were keeping right with us. We’re here most days around this time.” He headed off in the direction of the homeless guys, and Frank accompanied him, thinking to return to his dinner site and clear away his trash.

  The homeless guys were still there, nattering at each other like Laurel and Hardy: “I did not! You did. I did not, you did.” Something in the intonation revealed to Frank that these were the two he had heard the night before, passing him in the dark.

  “Now you wanna play?” the chess player said when he saw Frank.

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  He sat across from the boy, sweating, still feeling the glow of his miracle shot. Throwing on the run; no doubt it was a very old thing, a hunter thing. His whole brain and body had been working out there. Hunting, sure, and the finding and picking up of the frisbees in the dusk was like gathering. Hunting and gathering; and maybe these were no longer the same activities if one were hunting for explanations, or gathering data. Maybe only physical hunting and gathering would do.

  The homeless guys droned on, bickering over their half-assed efforts to get a fire started in the stone fireplace. A piece of shit, as one called it.

  “Who built that?” Frank asked.

  “National Park. Yeah, look at it. It’s got a roof.”

  “It looks like a smoker.”

  “They were idiots.”

  “It was the WPA, probly.”

  Frank said, “Isn’t this place closed at dusk?”

  “Yeah right.”

  “The whole fucking park is closed, man. Twenty-four seven.”

  “Closed for the duration.”

  “Yeah right.”

  “Closed until further notice.”

  “Five-dollar game?” the youngster said to Frank, rattling the box of pieces.

  Frank sighed. “I don’t want to bet. I’ll play you for free.” Frank waved at the first vet. “I’ll be more batting practice for you, like him.”

  “Zeno ain’t never just batting practice!”

  The boy’s frown was different. “Well, okay.”

  Frank hadn’t played since a long-ago climbing expedition to the Cirque of the Unclimbables, a setting in which chess had always seemed as inconsequential as tiddly-winks. Now he quickly found that using the timer actually helped his game, by making him give up analyzing the situation in depth in favor of just going with the flow of things, with the shape or pattern. In the literature they called this approach a “good-enough decision heuristic,” although in this case it wasn’t even close to good enough; he attacked on the left side, had both knights out and a great push going, and then suddenly it was all revealed as hollow, and he was looking at the wrong end of the endgame.

  “Shit,” he said, obscurely pleased.

  “Told ya,” Zeno scolded him.

  The night was warm and full of spring smells, mixing with the mud stench. Frank was still hot from the frisbee run. Some distant gawking cries wafted up from the ravine, as if peacocks were on the loose. The guys at the next table were laughing hard. The third vet was sitting on the ground, trying to read a Post by laying it on the ground in front of the fitful fire. “You can only see the fire if you lie on the ground, or look right down the smoke hole. How stupid is that?” They rained curses on their miserable fire. Chessman finished boxing his chess pieces and took off.

  Zeno said to Frank, “Why didn’t you play him for money, man? Take him five blow jobs to make up for that.”

  “Whoah,” Frank said, startled.

  Zeno laughed, a harsh ragged bray, mocking and aggressive, tobacco-raspy. “HA ha ha.” A kind of rebuke or slap. He had the handsome face of a movie villain, a sidekick to someone like Charles Bronson or Jack Palance. “Ha ha—what you think, man?”

  Frank bagged his dinner boxes and stood. “What if I had beat him?”

  “You ain’t gonna beat him.” With a twist of the mouth that added, asshole.

  “Next time,” Frank promised, and took off.

  Primate in forest. Warm and sweaty, full of food, beer and ouzo; still fully endorphined from running with the frisbee guys. It was dark now, although the park wore the same nightcap of noctilucent cloud it had the night before, close over the trees. It provided enough light to see by, just barely. The tree trunks were obvious in some somatic sense; Frank slipped between them as if dodging furniture in a dark house he knew very well. He felt alert, relaxed. Exfoliating in the vegetable night, in the background hum of the city, the click of twigs under his feet. He swam through the park.

  An orange flicker glimpsed in the distance caused him to slow down, change direction, approach it at an angle. He hid behind trees as he approached. He sidled closer, like a spy or a hunter. It felt good. Like the frisbee run, but different. He got close enough to be sure it was a campfire, at the center of another brace of picnic tables. Here they had a normal fire ring to work with. Faces in the firelight: bearded, dirty, ruddy. Homeless guys like the ones behind him, like the ones on the street corners around the city, sitting by signs asking for money. Mostly men, but there was one woman sitting at this fire, knitting. She gave t
he whole scene a domestic look, like something out of Hogarth.

  After a while Frank moved on, descending in darkness through the trees. The gash of the torn ravine appeared below him, white in the darkness. A broad canyon of sandstone, brilliant under the luminous cloud. The creek was a black ribbon cutting through it. Probably the moon was near full, somewhere up above the clouds; there was more light than the city alone could account for. Both the cloud ceiling and the newly torn ravine glowed, the sandstone like sinuous naked flesh.

  A truck, rumbling in the distance. The sound of the creek burbling over stones. Distant laughter, a car starting; tinkle of broken glass; something like a dumpster lid slamming down. And always the hum of the city, a million noises blended together, like the light caught in the cloud. It was neither quiet, nor dark, nor empty. It definitely was not wilderness. It was city and forest simultaneously. It was hard to characterize how it felt.

  Where would one sleep out here?

  Immediately the question organized his walk. He had been wandering before, but now he was on the hunt again. He saw that many things were a hunt. It did not have to be a hunt to kill and eat animals. Any search on foot was a kind of hunt. As now.

  He ranged up and away from the ravine. First in importance would be seclusion. A flat dry spot, tucked out of the way. There, for instance, a tree had been knocked over in the flood, its big tangle of roots raised to the sky, creating a partial cave under it—but too damp, too closed in.

  Cobwebs caught his face and he wiped them away. He looked up into the network of black branches. Being up in a tree would solve so many problems. . . . That was a prehominid thought, perhaps caused merely by craning his neck back. No doubt there was an arboreal complex in the brain crying out: Go home, go home!

  He ranged uphill, moving mostly northward. A hilltop was another option. He looked at one of the knolls that divided Rock Creek’s vestigial western tributaries. Nice in some ways; flat; but as with root hollows, these were places where all manner of creatures might take refuge. The truth was that the best nooks were best for everything out there. A distant crash in the brush reminded him that this might include the zoo’s jaguar.