He slowed as he approached Connecticut. And there was the blond man, hurrying past him down the big avenue, glowering.
Frank fell in behind him. They were approaching the Van Ness/UDC Metro station. At the top of the escalator the man glanced one last time over his shoulder, a sneer twisting his face, the petulant sneer of a man who always got what he wanted—
Frank snatched the hand axe from his pocket and threw it as hard as he could. The stone spun through the air on a line and flashed past the man’s head so close to his left ear that the man lurched reflexively to the right, disappearing abruptly from view as the stone whacked into the concrete wall backing the escalator hole.
Frank ran to it, slowed, looked down into the big oval tunnel, caught sight of the blond man running down the last risers into the station below. Around the opening, pick up his hand axe lying on the sidewalk. It looked the same, maybe a new chip on one edge. There was a deep gash in the concrete wall. He felt it with a finger, found his hand was trembling.
Back to the escalator, down behind a pair of students, pass them on the left. Windbreaker hood over his head? No. Nothing unusual. But it was cold. He pulled the hood over his head, put his hands in the windbreaker’s pockets, axe cradled in the right hand. His hands were cold, ears too. Nose running.
Down into the station, buy ticket, through the turnstiles. Look over the metal rail, assuming that the blond man would be going toward Shady Grove: yes. There he was, blond hair gleaming in the dim light of the station.
Frank grabbed a free paper from a trash can, descended to trackside, sat on one of the concrete benches pretending to read. The blond man stood by the track. The lights in the floor flashed on and off. In the dim warmth they felt the first blast of wind from the coming train.
Frank got on the car ahead of the one the man entered. He was pretty sure the man would get off at Bethesda, as Caroline had that first time. So when they rolled into Bethesda he got off a little before the man did, walked to the up escalator ahead of him, took it up without looking back. Through the turnstiles, up the last long escalator, standing to the right as so many people did.
Near the top the blond man brushed by him on the left, already talking on his cell phone. “We’ll find her,” he said as he passed. “I know she did it.”
Frank stayed on his big riser, teeth clenched. He followed the man across the bus level of the station to the last short escalator, up that. Then south on Wisconsin, yes, just the way Caroline had gone that first time, right on a side street, yes. The man was still talking on his phone, not looking around at all. Barking an order, laughing once. An ugly sound. Frank tried to relax his jaw, he was going to break a tooth. He was hot inside his windbreaker. Breaking a sweat. A few blocks west of Wisconsin the man clapped his phone shut and soon after that turned up the broad stairs of a small apartment building on Hagar, pulling keys from his pocket and shaking his head. He entered the building without looking back.
Frank waited for a few minutes, looking at the building and the street outside. He didn’t want it to be over. Suddenly he saw what to do. He went up the steps to the apartment door, jabbed every little black doorbell on the panel to the left of the door, then hustled across the street and stood under a streetlight casting a cone of orange light on the sidewalk and part of the street. He stood under one edge of the light, pulling the hood of his windbreaker far forward. His face was sure to be in shadow, a black absence, like a gangster hit man or Death itself. He thrust the pointed end of the hand axe forward in the windbreaker pocket until it pushed at the cloth.
The curtain in the window on the top floor twitched. His quarry was looking down at him. Frank tilted his head up just enough to show that he was returning the gaze. He held the pose for a few seconds, long enough to make his point: The hunter hunted. Hunted by a murderous watcher, always there to haunt one’s dreams. Then he stepped back and out of the cone of light, into dark shadows and away.
After that Frank walked back out to Wisconsin.
He started to shiver in his thin sweater and windbreaker. Up Wisconsin, back to the Metro.
He felt stunned. Some of what he had done in the heat of the moment now shocked him, and he reeled a bit as he remembered, growing more and more appalled—throwing the hand axe at him? What had he been thinking? He could have killed the guy! Good, good riddance, that would have taught him—except not! It would have been terrible. The police would have hunted for Caroline. They would have been hunting for him too, without knowing they were; but Caroline when she heard about it would have known, and who knew what her reaction might be, he couldn’t actually be sure but it was bound to be bad. No matter what, it would have been terrible. Crazy. Leap before you look, sure, but what if your leaps were crazy? He didn’t even want to be out there! He had broken a date with Diane to do this shit!
On Wisconsin again. He didn’t know what to do. He wondered if he would ever see Caroline again. Maybe she had used him to help her get away, the same way he had used the bros to help him. Well sure. That was what had happened, in effect. And he had offered to do it. But still . . .
Down into the Metro, nervous waiting, down to Van Ness, out of the Metro. Back in his van Frank changed clothes again. Despite the cold his shirt was soaked with sweat. Pull on his capilene undershirt, thick sweater; in the van’s side mirror he could see that once again he looked fairly normal. Incredible.
He sat in the driver’s seat. He didn’t know what to do. His hands were still shaking. He felt sick.
Eventually the cold drove him to start the engine. Then, driving north on Connecticut, he thought of going to the Quiblers. He could sit there and drink a beer and watch the fucking election results. No one would care if he didn’t say anything. Warm up. Play chess or Scrabble with Nick and watch the TV.
He got in the left-turn lane at Bradley. Waiting for the light he remembered the bros and pulled out his FOG phone, hit resend.
“Hey Nosey.”
“Zeno are you guys okay?”
“Yeah sure. Are you?”
“I’m okay. Hey listen, my clothes I left there at the tables are chipped with some kind of microwave transmitter.”
“We figured as much. So you got parole officers too, eh?”
“Yeah I guess.”
“Ha. We’ll dee-ex your stuff. But what was with that gal, eh? Don’t you know not to mess with parole officers?”
“Yeah yeah. What about you, what was that shooting, who did that? I didn’t think you guys were carrying.”
“Yeah right.” Zeno snorted. “We kill those deer with our teeth.”
“Well there is that.”
“Shit’s dangerous out here. I can’t hardly keep Andy from popping people in situations like that. Everyone’s a gook when he gets excited.”
“Well, it did put those guys on the run.”
“Sure. Better than getting hit in the face with a two-by-four.”
“Yeah, sure. Thanks for the help.”
“That’s okay. But don’t do shit like that to us anymore. We get enough excitement as it is.”
“Yeah okay.”
CHARLIE ANSWERED THE DOORBELL AND WAS happy to see Frank. “Hey Frank, good to see you, come on in! The Khembalis came over on their way home too, and the early returns are looking pretty good.”
“My fingers are crossed,” Frank said, but as he took off his windbreaker he looked unhopeful. Inside the entryway he stopped as he saw people sitting in the living room by the fire. He went over and greeted Drepung and Sucandra and Padma, done with their own party, and then Charlie introduced him to Sridar. Again it seemed to Charlie that Frank was unusually subdued. No doubt many of his big programs at NSF were riding on the election results.
Charlie went out to the kitchen to get drinks, and circulating as he did in the next hour, he only occasionally noticed Frank, talking or playing with Joe, or watching the TV. Results were coming in more quickly now. The voting in every state was tight, the results as predicted: the red states went to th
e president, the blue states to Phil Chase. The exceptions tended to balance out, and it became clear that this time it was going to come down to the western states and whoever was delayed in reporting a winner due to the closeness of the results. Chase had a decent chance of winning the whole West Coast, and if some of the late-reporting states went his way, the election too. It was all hanging in the balance.
Charlie sat above Nick on the couch, watching the colored maps on the TV, talking sometimes on the phone with Roy. Joe was sitting on the floor, putting together the wooden train tracks and babbling to himself. Charlie watched him very curiously, not sure what he was seeing yet. Anna had taken Joe’s temperature when they got home, curious at the effect of the snow, Charlie assumed. It had been 98.2; she had shaken her head, said nothing.
Charlie felt a bit drained, perhaps even a bit exorcised, as it were—as if something strange had been inside him as well as in Joe, and Drepung and Rudra’s ceremony designed to remove them both. That was a new thought for Charlie—he had not considered the matter in any such light before—but it was certainly true that a feeling of oppression that had been weighing on him for a long time had lifted somehow, leaving a lightness that felt also a bit empty perhaps. He didn’t know what he felt.
He saw that Drepung too was keeping an eye on Joe.
Frank sat on the couch across from them, chewing a toothpick and looking tense. The evening wore on. Eventually the Khembalis said their goodbyes and left. “I’ll be home in a bit,” Frank said to them.
When they were gone, Frank glanced at Charlie. “Mind if I stay and see it out?”
“Not at all. As long as it doesn’t go on for three months.”
“Ha. It is looking close.”
“I think California will put us over the top.”
“Maybe so.”
They watched on. Eastern states, central states, mountain states. Joe fell asleep on the floor; Nick read a book, lying sleepily on the couch. Charlie went to the bathroom, came back downstairs. “Any more states?”
Anna and Frank shook their heads. Things appeared to be hung up out west. Frank sat hunched over, eating his toothpick fragment by fragment. Anna sighed, went out to the kitchen to clean up. She did not like to hope for things, Charlie knew, because she feared the disappointment if her hopes were dashed. You should hope anyway, Charlie had told her more than once. We have to hope.
Hopes are just wishes we doubt will come true, she always replied. She preferred waiting, then dealing with whatever happened. Work on the moment.
But of course it was impossible not to hope, no matter what one resolved. Now she clattered dishes nervously in the kitchen, hoping despite herself. Therefore irritated.
“I wonder what’s up,” Charlie said.
“Hnn.”
Frank was never a big talker, but tonight the cat seemed to have got his tongue. Charlie always tried to fill silences made by other people, it was a bad habit but he was helpless to stop it, as he never noticed it was happening until afterward. “Okay, here’s what’s going to happen,” he said now. “All the west is going to go for the president except California and Oregon, but that’ll be enough for Phil to win.”
“Maybe.”
They watched the numbers on the screens get bigger, barely attending to what they were saying. The minutes dragged by. Anna came back in and sat by Charlie, began falling asleep. Even before the boys had arrived nothing had been able to keep her awake past her bedtime, and now she had ten years of sleep deprivation to catch up on.
Then Charlie clicked away from a commercial to find that NBC was declaring California had gone for Phil Chase, which gave him 275 electoral votes and made him the winner. They got to their feet, cheering. Anna woke up confused, “What? What? Can it be? Can it be real?” She made them click around and confirm it on the other channels, and they all confirmed it; “Oh my God,” she cried, and started to weep with joy. Charlie and Frank toasted with beer, got Nick a soda to toast with them. Joe woke up and climbed into Anna’s lap as she channel-surfed, being suddenly eager to soak in all the information that she could. “How did this happen?” There were claims of irregularities in Oregon voting machines, apparently, where the margin of victory was especially tight. But Oregon, like California, had voting machine safeguards in place, and the officials there were confident the result would be validated.
Charlie gave Roy a call, and in the middle of the first ring Roy came on singing “Ding dong, the witch is dead, the witch is dead, the witch is dead, ding dong, the wicked witch is dead!”
“Jeez Roy I could be a Republican staffer calling to congratulate you—”
“And I wouldn’t give a damn! The wicked witch is dead! And our boss is president!”
“Yes, we’re in for it now.”
“Yes we are! You’re going to have to come back to work, Chucker! No more Mr. Mom for you!”
“I don’t know about that,” Charlie said, glancing over at Joe, who was burbling happily at Anna as she leaned forward to hear the TV better. A traitorous thought sprang into his mind: That isn’t my Joe.
“—get yourself down to the convention center and celebrate! Bring the whole family!”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Should we go down to the headquarters and celebrate?”
“No,” Anna and Frank said together.
“Maybe I’ll go down there later,” Charlie told Roy.
“Later, later, what’s with later? This is the moment!”
“True. But it’s a party that will last a while.”
“All night my friend. I wouldn’t mind seeing you in the flesh, we need to confer big time now! Everyone in the office is going to get a new job, you realize that.”
“Yes,” Charlie said. “Advisor to the president.”
“Friend of the president! We’re his friends, Charlie.”
“Us and twenty thousand other people.”
“Yes but no, we’re in the God-damned White House.”
“I guess we are. Jesus. Well, Phil will be great. If anyone can stay human in that job, he can.”
“Oh sure, sure. He’ll be human, he’ll be all too human.”
“He’ll be more than human.”
“That’s right! So get your ass down here and party!”
“Maybe I will.”
Charlie let him get back to it. The house suddenly seemed quiet. Joe was still playing cheerfully on the couch next to Anna. She got up, grinning now, and started to clean up. Frank got up to help her.
“This should help all your projects big time,” Charlie said to him. “Phil is really into them.”
“That’s good. We’ll need it.”
“He’ll probably appoint Diane Chang to a second term at NSF.”
“Huhn,” Frank said, looking over at him. “Really?”
“Yeah, I think so. I’ve heard that discussed. He likes what she’s been doing, of course. How could you not?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.” Frank picked up a plate, looking distracted.
They finished cleaning up. “I guess I’ll be off,” Frank said. “Thanks for having me over.”
THE DRIVE BACK TO KHEMBALI HOUSE took a long time. Frank chose to drive down Wisconsin and cross the Potomac on the Key Bridge, the shortest route by far, but it was a mistake; the streets were packed with people, literally packed, so that cars had to inch along, nudging their way forward through a mass of celebrating humanity. The District of Columbia had voted nine to one for Democratic candidates for many years, and now a good proportion of the ninety percent were in the streets partying, and cars be damned. Frank had seen this once long before, when he had happened to visit an old girlfriend in D.C. on the Fourth of July, and they had gone down to the Mall to see the Beach Boys. The crowd that day was estimated at seven hundred thousand, and when the concert and fireworks were over everyone had left at once. The Metro being overwhelmed, Frank and his friend had walked up 17th and then Connecticut to her place near Dupont Circle, and the entire way they had str
olled with the rest of the crowd right down the middle of the street, forcing the helpless cars among them to creep at a pedestrian pace.
This was just like that—a sudden Carnavale, bursting onto Wisconsin. It had the feel of that day in the cold snap when everyone had gone out on the frozen Potomac. The city surprised by joy.
Frank watched through the windows of his van, feeling detached. No doubt it was good news—parts of him knew it was very good news—but he could not feel it. He was still too disturbed by what had happened with Caroline and her husband.
Inching forward, he gave Edgardo a call.
When Edgardo picked up, Frank’s ear was blasted by the sound of one of Astor Piazzolla’s wild tangos, the bandoneon leading the charge with such scrunching dissonances that Frank’s phone howled. “LET ME TURN IT DOWN” he heard as he held the phone at arm’s length.
“Sure.”
“Okay I’m back! Who is it?”
“It’s Frank.”
“Ah, Frank! How are you!”
“I’m okay. So, what happened?”
Edgardo laughed. “Didn’t you hear?” he said. “Phil Chase won the election!”
Behind his voice the tango kept charging along, and the shifting static in the phone led Frank to think that he might be dancing around his apartment.
“I know that, but how?”
“We will certainly be talking about how this happened for a long time, Frank, and I’m sure it will keep us entertained on our runs. But I predict right now that no one will ever be able to say exactly why this election came out the way it did.” He laughed again, seemingly at the way he could use such innocuous pundit clichés to convey exactly what he meant: not now. Of course. And maybe never. “Meanwhile just enjoy yourself, Frank. Celebrate.”
Fifty Degrees Below Page 48
