Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [156]
“What a kid.”
“We’re twice as old as that, kid. No wonder your nose bleeds.”
“In point of fact I’m fifty-eight,” said Fedpage.
“Boomer scum.”
“Yeah, he went to the University of Vietnam.”
“So what was it like?”
“It was fucked! What do you think?”
“At least it wasn’t cold,” Zeno said dourly. “It might have been fucked but at least you didn’t freeze your dick off.”
“I told you to put a sock down there.”
“Put a sock on it! Good idea!”
Fedpage, solemn, calculating: “I would need one of them knee socks.”
General mirth. Discussion of burning needle sensation during penile thawing. Listing of exceptional cases of genital trauma. Frank watched Zeno brood. Zeno noticed and snapped, “It was fucked, man.”
“It was everything,” Fedpage said.
“That’s true. It was every kind of thing. There were some guys over there who joined up specifically to kill people. Some people were like that. But most of them weren’t, and for them it was hell. They didn’t know what hit them. We just did what we were told and tried to stay alive.”
“Which we did.”
“But we were lucky! It was sheer dumb luck. When we were in Danang we could just as easily been over-run.”
“What happened there?” Frank said.
“We got caught by the Tet offensive—”
“He don’t know about any of that. We were cut off, okay? We were surrounded in a town and we got hammered. They killed a lot of us and they would have killed all of us except the Air Force made some passes. Bombed the shit out of those NVA.”
“Dropped us food too.”
“That’s right, we were going to starve as well as get massacred. It was a race to see which. Incompetent bastards.”
“We shared the last food, remember that?”
“Of course. A fucking spoonful. Didn’t do any of us a bit of good.”
“It was a team thing. You should have seen Zeno the time we heloed down into a minefield and the medic wouldn’t get out to help some wounded. Zeno just jumped out and ran right across that minefield, he led those brothers back in just like there weren’t no mines out there. Even after one of them went off and dee-exed a guy who didn’t follow right in his footsteps.”
“You did that?” Frank said.
“Yeah well,” Zeno said. He looked away, shrugged. “That was my Zeno’s paradox moment I guess. I mean if you’re always only halfway there, then you can’t ever step on no mine, right?”
Frank laughed.
“It was great,” Fedpage insisted.
“No it wasn’t. It was just what it was. Then you get back to the States and it’s all like some bad movie. Some stupid fucking sitcom. That’s America man. It’s all such bullshit. People act like they’re such big deals, they act like all their rules are real when really they’re just bullshit so they can keep you down and take everything for themselves.”
“True,” Fedpage said.
“Ha ha. Well, here we are. Looks like the fire is about halfway down. Who’s going to go get more wood for this fire, I ain’t gonna do it.”
“So did you ever go up to the shelter?”
“Sure.”
The hard wind finally struck as forecast, and it got bad again for a couple days, as bad as in the beginning. “It ain’t the cold, it’s the—”
“Shut the fuck up!”
Frozen branches snapped and fell all over town, on people, cars, power lines, rooftops. Frank went out every day and helped Cutter and his crew. Then one day, clearing a fallen tree from a downed power line, a branch swung his way and thwacked him on the face.
“Oh sorry I couldn’t get that! Hey Frank! Hey are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” Frank said, hands at his face. He still couldn’t feel his nose. He tasted blood at the back of his throat, swallowed. It was nothing new. It happened from time to time. It even tasted like old blood, left over from the original injury. He shook it off, kept on carrying wood.
The next morning, however, he got out of his van and walked up and down Connecticut, and—he couldn’t decide what to do. Time for a leap before you look, therefore; do whatever came to hand. But where to start?
He never got started. He walked up Connecticut to Chevy Chase Circle, then back down to the zoo. How big the world became when it tasted like blood.
He stopped at a stoplight