chapter 11. the way God supposed
The winter sun berths itself in the sky for a day and begins to melt the snow, so that he can hear cars topside making their way sloppily through the slush. But in the tunnel the wind lashes along, carrying its insistent chill. Thirty-two days of snow and ice. The most brutal winter he has known. Treefrog pulls the hood of the sleeping bag around his head and lays a shirt over his face, the buttons icy at his nose.
Best to stay in bed the rest of the day, he thinks, but Castor comes up beside him and nuzzles her way under the shirt and he feels her rib cage hard against his face.
Still in his sleeping bag, Treefrog manages to get on a few extra shirts and his gloves, then hops out and takes some milk from the Gulag, the liquid frozen solid. He stabs open the box with his knife, and a cube of milk falls into the pan. Quickly, he heats it over a small fire. Castor laps at the feast and afterward jumps onto the mattress and curls up on the blankets, white fur almost phosphorescent in the dark. Treefrog takes an old thermometer from a box of hubcaps. He rises and gauges all over: by the stalactite, at the ice wall, on the train tracks, in his back cave, by Faraday’s broken traffic light, in the Gulag, at the fire pit, and on the bedside table, where it reads only sixteen degrees Fahrenheit — cold, so goddamn cold.
Warming the thermometer with his breath until it hits an even eighteen, he stands and urinates painfully in a piss bottle.
Time to dump the bottles up above.
With Castor inside his shirt, Treefrog goes outside through the tunnel gate, where the bright light stings his eyes. He puts on his sunglasses and pours his name in the whiteness near the crab-apple trees, but there is not enough to finish off the words. He breaks an icy twig off a tree and carves the remaining letters.
Four and a half weeks of relentless ice and snow already. Maybe he should carve the days in notches by the Gulag.
He follows the bend of the highway, walks down to the green benches at the edge of the Hudson.
Ice still on the water and he wonders about his crane, how far it has gone toward the sea. Across the water, New Jersey catches the sunlight.
Angela sits, alone, on the bench. Snow is bellied up around her shoes.
“Heyyo,” he says, but she doesn’t reply.
She has spread a blue plastic bag beneath herself so her clothes don’t soak up the wetness. Treefrog sits on the high back of the bench. He takes Castor and puts her in Angela’s lap, and the cat curls up, contented, as she strokes it.
“Fine morning,” Treefrog says, “fine morning.”
“No it ain’t,” says Angela.
“What’s up?”
“I wanna wash my hair.”
“Let’s go to my nest. I’ll boil some water for you.”
“No way, I ain’t climbing up there.” She pulls her scarf up around her neck. “How come it’s so cold and the sun still shining?”
“Refraction,” he says. “The sun bounces off the snow.”
“Oh, yeah? You’re so clever, ain’t ya? The only thing bouncing off the snow is your bullshit.” But after a moment she says, “You know what? When I lived in that house with the wraparound porch we had hot water all the time. It was red ’cause it had too much iron and I didn’t like to wash my hair ’cause it made my hair stiff and I thought the color’d be funky, but now I wish I could wash my hair in that funky warm water, I’d wash my hair in that funky warm water all day long and night too.”
“It’d be clean, then.”
“It’s clean now, motherfucker!”
“I’m only saying.”
“And I’d wash it in the afternoon too if I had the time.”
Treefrog adjusts the glasses. “Say. Where’s Elijah?”
“Gone to get his SSI. Five hundred bucks a month.”
“Man,” says Treefrog. “He’s got an address?”
“He’s got a friend with an apartment and then they get the money and then they go to the candy store. I hope he keeps me some. He said he’ll keep me some.”
“That stuff’s bad for you,” he says.
She chuckles and looks away.
“Hey, Angela,” he says. “You killed them rats yet?”
“I told you, the pregnant one is pregnant. She’s called Skagerak.”
“Huh?”
“Papa Love told me they’s Norway rats and I asked him for the name of a place in Norway, somewhere like the sea, and he told me Skagerak and Barents, so I called them Skagerak and Barents.”
“You talked to Papa Love?”
“He was out putting the finishing touches on that guy Edison.”
“Faraday.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever.”
“And you asked him about rats?”
“Yeah.”
“And you gave ’em names?”
“Yeah, what’s it to you?”
“Now I heard it all.”
“The girl rat is nice. She comes right up beside me. Someday she’s gonna take the bread right outa my hands.”
“Damn.”
They sit in a long silence, him perched high on the back of the bench, watching the slumber of the water.
“The sea looks nice,” she says.
“That’s not the sea, that’s the Hudson. The sea’s down there.”
She purses her lips as if about to kiss the air. “You know what? I always wanted to see the sea. When we were in Iowa, we had a car, Plymouth Volare, a dented piece of shit, you know, and me and my sisters’d be in the backseat, saying, I see the sea and the sea sees me. And my father’d say, We’re going to the sea. But then we’d always run outa gas and he’d kick that dented piece of shit and he’d say, Just a minute. He’d go down the road to get gas — he had a gas can in the trunk — but he’d stop in a bar and that was it. And we’d be in the backseat, singing that stupid song, I see the sea and the sea sees me. Once we tried to walk home through the fields, but the cornstalks were way up above our heads and we was scared and went back to the car.”
“Nothing stopping you from going now to see it, is there?”
“No. I s’pose.”
“You should go see it,” he says. “Take the train to Coney Island, it’s nice out there.”
He moves to sit down on the bench, tugs some of her plastic bag, plants himself beside her, but she looks away. “Hey,” he says, surprised.
She shields her face. “Leave me alone.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“He hit you, didn’t he?”
“I fell, goddammit, leave me alone.”
“When did he hit you?”
“You’re a pain in the ass, you know that? You’re a pain in the ass bigger than any I ever seen. I’m sitting here getting some quiet, you come along, why the fuck don’t you leave me alone, huh?”
“You should go to a shelter.”
“Ever been in one of them places? They got women with smashed bones and bitten ears and gaps in theys teeth wide enough to drive a D-train through.”