Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [129]
This made for a very quiet neighborhood. No one wanted to attract the attention of the police. Any lit windows Frank gave a wide berth on principle, and so apparently did everyone else. Good avoidance protocols make good neighbors. Chessman might be tucked away in one of these hulks, but if so Frank wasn’t going to find out by knocking on doors or looking in windows.
And he doubted the youth would be in any of them anyway. Chessman had had a healthy propensity for staying outdoors.
That being the case, where was he?
Then Frank ran into Cutter out on Connecticut, and a tendril connected two parcels in his mind. “Cutter, do you know what happened to Chessman?”
“No, I ain’t seen him lately. Don’t know what happened to him.”
“Do you know anyone who might?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Byron, he used to play chess with him. I’ll ask.”
“Thanks, I’d appreciate that. Do you know what his real name was, by chance?”
“No, only thing I heard him called was Chessman.”
Out in the park proper the forest now seemed wilderness, with most human sign snowed over or overgrown or flooded away. It was a whole world. Firelight in the distance the only touch of humanity. A kind of Mirkwood or primeval forest, every tree Yggdrasil, and Frank the Green Man. Encountering a structure now was like stumbling on ruins. The Carter Barron amphitheater and the huge bridges south of the zoo looked like the work of Incans or Atlanteans.
The campfires in the park, unlike the squatter houses, could be investigated. It was possible to approach them surreptitiously, to put them under surveillance, to see if any of the little firelit faces were known to him. Stalking, pure and simple. Peering around trees, over flood snags, now flanked by snowdrifts. Rain had hardened the snow. Stepping through the crust made a distinct crunchy noise. One had to float on top with one’s weight on the back foot until the next step was pressed home. Time for the tiger mind to come to the fore. Someone had reported seeing the jaguar, east of the park.
Once he came on a single old man shivering before a smoky little blaze, obviously sick, and he roused him and asked him if he could get himself out to one of the homeless shelters on Connecticut, or the ER at the UDC hospital; but stubbornly the old man turned away from him, not quite coherent, maybe drunk, but maybe sick. All Frank could do was call 911 and give GPS coordinates, and wait for an EMS team to hike in and take over. Even if you were healthy, living out here was a tenuous thing, but for a sick person it was miserable. The paramedics ended up talking him onto a stretcher and carrying him out. The next night Frank passed by again, as part of his rounds, to see if the man had returned and if he was okay. No one there, fire out.
And never a sign of Chessman. The longer it went on the less likely it seemed Frank would ever find him. He must have moved to a different part of the city, or out of the metro area entirely.
One evening before climbing into his tree house Frank hiked under the moon, in a stiff north wind that tossed the branches up and down and side to side, a glorious skitter-skatter of black lines against gray sky. When he headed north the wind shoved his breath right into his lungs. How big the world seemed with the moonlight on the snow.
Then he came over the rise next to site 21 and saw around its fire shouting figures, fighting furiously. “Hey!” he cried, rushing down in a wild glissade. Something hit the fire and sparks exploded out of it; Frank saw a figure swing something to hit one of the prone bros, and as Frank plunged through the last trees toward him, shouting and pulling the hand axe from his fanny pack, the man looked up and Frank saw suddenly that it was the crazy guy who had chased him off Route 66 in his pick-up truck.