Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [137]
He stifled a sigh and got off as best he could.
One windless night he snowshoed out and saw that some of the fires were back. Sparks in the darkness, at picnic sites and squatter camps. People out and about. Perhaps it was the lack of wind.
Under the luminous cloud the snow was a brilliant white. The forest looked like the park of some enormous estate, everything groomed perfectly for a demanding squire. Far to the north a movement in the trees suggested to him the aurochs, or something else very big. The jaguar wouldn’t be that big.
The bros were back home, he was happy to see, several of them sitting at the picnic tables, a few standing by a good fire in the ring.
“Hey Perfesser! Perfesser Nosebleed! How ya doing, man?”
They did not gather around him, but for the moment he was the center of attention. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Good for you!”
“You look terrible!”
“Now’s when you should pop him on the nose if you were ever gonna!”
Frank said, “Oh come on.”
“I don’t have to ask who’s winning now! The other guy’s winning!”
Frank said, “Don’t make me laugh or I’ll bleed on you.”
This pleased them very much. They went on ragging him. He threw a branch on the fire and sat down next to the woman, who nodded her approval as she counted stitches.
“You did good,” she told him.
“What do you mean?”
“The bozos here say you came blasting in like the cavalry.”
“So who were those guys?” Frank asked the group.
“Who knows.”
“Fucking little motherfuckers.”
“It’s one of them Georgia Avenue gangs, man, those guys just live off the streets like us, or worse.”
“But the guys beating on you were white,” Frank observed.
The fire crackled as they considered this.
“It’s getting kind of dangerous out here,” Frank said.
“It always was, Nosebleed.”
“Just got to keep out of the way,” the woman murmured as she began needling again, bringing the work up close to her eyes.
“How you doing?” Frank asked her as the others returned to their riffs and arias.
“Day hundred and forty-two,” she said with a decisive nod.
“Congratulations, that’s great. Are you keeping warm?”
“Hell no.” She guffawed. “How would I do that?”
“Did you get one of my tarps?”
“No, what’s that?”
“I’ll bring them out again. Just a tarp, like a tent fly, you know.”
“Oh.” She was dismissive; possibly she had a place to sleep. “How’d you do up at the hospital?”
“What? Oh fine, fine.”
She nodded. “They’ve got a good ER.”
“Did you—I mean, I don’t remember going there.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Frank was. He could recall the blow, the moments immediately afterward. It hadn’t occurred to him that the next thing he recalled after that was sitting in the ER waiting room, bleeding into paper towels, waiting to be seen. “How’d I get up there?”
“We walked you up. You were okay, just bleeding a lot.”
“I don’t remember that part.”
“Concussion, I’m sure. You got hammered.”
“Did you see what hit me?”
“No, I was tucked down in a lay-by during the fight. Zeno and Andy found you afterward and we took you on up. You don’t remember?”
“No.”
“That’s concussion for you.”
One day at NSF he worked on the photovoltaic cell trials. Department of Energy was now squawking that this was their bailiwick. Then his alarm went off and he went down and sat in his van.
He couldn’t figure out what to do next.
He could taste blood at the back of his throat.
What did that mean? Was something not healing right, some ruptured blood vessel still leaking? Was there pressure on his brain?
Blood was leaking, that was for sure. But of course there must still be swelling inside; he still had a fat lip, after all, and why should swelling inside go away any faster? His black eyes were still visible, though they were turning