Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [102]
“We had to pull him right off the guy, yeah! I had to peel his fingers right off of his neck! He was pounding his head right against the concrete.”
Finally they were done. Frank said, “Hey, your fire? It sucks.”
A shout of agreement and dissent. Zeno said, “Hey whaddya mean, dude? It’s perfect for shoving yer head in the can!”
“YARRR.”
“That’s the only way you could see it,” Frank countered. “Why don’t you go where one of the good firepits are?”
They laughed at his naÏveté. “That’d be too good for us!”
“Might have us a fire if we did that!”
One of them mimed a karate kick at the stone oven. “Piece of shit.”
“You need fire,” Frank said.
“We GOT a fire.”
“Can’t you knock the top of this thing off, or make a fire ring next to it or something? Aren’t there any demolition sites or construction sites around here where you could get some cinder blocks?”
“Don’t be bringing the man down on us any more than he already is,” Fedpage said.
“Whatever,” Frank said. “You’re gonna freeze your asses off.”
“It’s a half-assed fire.”
“You have to put your hands right on the metal, it’s ridiculous.”
“No fucking way, it’s warm from here!”
“Yeah right.”
They settled in. The topic shifted to winter and winterizing in general, so Frank sat back and listened. No way were they going to respond to his words by jumping out into the night and putting together a decent fire ring. If that had been their style they wouldn’t be out here in the first place. Maybe later it would sink in.
A few of them discussed the prospects of sleeping at the Metro stops just coming back on line; the regulars for these spots had dispersed, so that good grates were going unclaimed. You could nest on a good site all day. But that risked a poorly-timed rousting by the cops. But if you didn’t take the risk, you weren’t likely to find a good spot.
Zeno declared he was going to build a hut and sleep right there by their site. Others agreed immediately that good shelters could be made. It all sounded hypothetical to Frank, he thought they were just covering for the fact that they didn’t want to talk about where they really slept.
That made sense to Frank; he wasn’t telling people where he slept either. The bros were under a different kind of surveillance than he was, more erratic but potentially much more immediate, with consequences much worse than Frank’s (one hoped). They had police records, many of them extensive. Technically much of what they were doing was illegal, including being in Rock Creek Park at all. Luckily a lot of people were doing the same thing. It was the herd defense; predators would pick off the weak, but the bulk of the herd would be okay. The more the better, therefore, up to a point—a point they had not yet reached, even though many little squatter settlements and even what could be called shanty towns were now visible in flood-damaged parts of town, especially in the parks. Ultimately this might trigger some large-scale crackdown, and Rock Creek Park was high profile. But the gorge’s new ravine walls were steep and unstable, impossible to patrol at night. To clear the gorge they would have to do it by day and call out the National Guard—both of them, as Zeno always added. If they did that the bros could slip away into the city, or north into the forest across the Maryland border.
Meanwhile, out of sight, out of mind. They were off the grid, they had slung their hooks, they had lit out for the territory. The firelight bounced on their worn faces, etching each knock and crease. Little more of them could be seen, making it seem like a circle of disembodied faces—masks again—or a Rockwell Kent woodblock.
“There was this guy living on the streets in San Francisco who turned out was like totally rich, he was heir to a fortune but he just liked living outdoors.”
“But he was a drunk too, right?”
“Fucking George Carlin is so funny.”
“They said I was grade ten but they wouldn’t give me dental.”
Blah blah blah. Frank recalled a fire from his youth: two climber gals slightly buzzed had come bombing into Camp Four around midnight and