Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

So, but they saved me. I got lucky. At first it seemed miraculous, but then the doctors told me it happens more often than you might think. Bullets are going so fast, they zip through and they’re out and gone. And this was a little one. I know, they’re saying I paid the guy to use a little one. Please give me a break. They tell me George Orwell got shot in the neck and lived. I always liked Animal Farm . The end of it, when you couldn’t tell the pigs from the men—that was powerful stuff. I always thought about what that ending said, not about the pigs and how they had changed, but about the men from the other farms. That would be us. People you couldn’t tell from pigs. Orwell still has a lot to say to us.

FRANK SPENT SUNDAY AFTERNOON WITH NICKand the FOG people, manning a blind north of Fort de Russey. It overlooked a deer trail, and sightings of deer predators as well as other big mammals were common: bear, wolf, coyote, lynx, aurochs, fox, tapir, armadillo, and then the one that had brought them there, reported a few days back, but as a questionable: jaguar?

Yes, there were still some sightings of the big cat. They were there at de Russey, in fact, to see if they too could spot it.

It didn’t happen that evening. There was much talk of how the jaguar might have survived the winters, whether it had inhabited one of the caves in the sandstone walls of the ravine, and eaten the deer in their winter laybys, or whether it had found a hole in an abandoned building and then gone dumpster diving like the rest of the city’s ferals. All kinds of excited speculation was bandied about (Frank stayed quiet when they discussed the feral life), but no sighting.

Nick was getting a ride home with his friend Max, and so Frank walked south, down the ravine toward the zoo. And there it was, crouching on the overlook, staring down at the now-empty salt lick. Frank froze as smoothly as he could.

It was black, but its short fur had a sheen of brown. Its body was long and sleek, its head squarish, and big in proportion to the body. Gulp. Frank slipped his hand in his pocket, grasped the hand axe and pulled it out, his fingers automatically turning it until it nestled in its best throwing position. Only then did he begin to back up, one slow step at a time. He was downwind. One of the cat’s ears twitched back and presented in his direction; he froze again. What he needed was some other animal to wander by and provide a distraction. Certainly the jaguar must have become extremely skittish in the time since the flood had freed it. Frank had assumed it had died and become just a story. But here it lay in the dusk of the evening. Frank’s blood had already rushed through him in a hot flood: big predator in the dusk, total adrenal awareness. You could see well in the dark if you had to. After his tiptoed retreat gained him a few more yards, Frank turned and ran like a deer, west toward the ridge trail.

He came out on Broad Branch and jogged out to Connecticut. Everything was pulsing a little bit. He made the call to Nancy and gave her the news of the sighting.

After that he walked up and down Connecticut for a while, exulting in the memory of the sighting, reliving it, fixing it. Eventually he found he was hungry. A Spanish restaurant on T Street had proven excellent in the past, and so Frank went to it and sat at one of its porch tables, next to the rail, looking at the passersby on the sidewalk. He was reading his laptop when suddenly Caroline’s ex sat down across from him. Edward Cooper, there in the flesh, big and glowering.

Frank, startled, recovered himself. He glared at the man. “What?” he said sharply.

The man stared back at him. “You know what,” he said. His voice was a rich baritone, like a radio DJ. “I want to talk to Caroline.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Frank said.

The blond man made a sour face. Aggrieved; tired of being patient. “Don’t,” he said. “I know who you are, and you know who I am.”

Frank saved, shut down, closed the lid of his laptop. This was strange; possibly dangerous; although the encounter with the jaguar put that in a different perspective, because it didn’t feel as dangerous as that. “Then why would I tell you anything about anybody at all?”

He could feel his pulse jumping in his neck and wrists. Probably he was red-faced. He put his laptop in his daypack on the floor by his chair, sat back. Without planning to, he reached in his jacket pocket and grasped the hand axe, turned it over in his hand until he had it in its proper heft. He met the man’s gaze.

Cooper continued to stare him in the eye. He crossed his arms over his chest, leaned back in his chair. “Maybe you don’t understand. If you don’t tell me how to get in touch with her, then I’ll have to find her using ways she won’t want me to use.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“But she will.”

Frank studied him. It was rare to see someone display aggravation for an extended period of time. The world did not live up to this man’s standards, that was clear in the set of his mouth, of his whole face. He was sure he was right. Right to be aggrieved. It was a little bit of a shock to see that Caroline had married a man who could not be fully intelligent.

“What do you want?” Frank said.

Cooper gestured that aside. “What makes you think you can barge into a situation like this and know what’s going on?” he asked. “Why do you even think you know what’s going on here?”

“You’re making it clear,” Frank said.

The man waved that away too. “I know she’s fed you a line about us. That’s what she does. Do you really think you’re the first one she’s done this kind of thing with?”

“What kind of thing?”

“Wrapped you around her little finger! Used you to get what she wants! Only this time she’s gotten in over her head. She’s broken the National Security Act, her loyalty oath, her contract, federal election law—it’s quite a list. She could get thirty years with that list. If she doesn’t turn herself in, if she’s caught, it’s likely to happen.”

Frank said, “I can see why she would stay away from you.”

“Look. Tampering with a federal election is a serious crime.”

“Yes it is.”

The man smiled, as if Frank had given something away. “You could be charged as an accessory, you know. That’s a felony too. We have her computers, and they’re full of the evidence we need to convict. She’s the only one who had the program that turned the vote in Oregon.”

Frank shrugged. Talk talk talk.

“What, you don’t care? You don’t care that you’re involved in a felony?”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because I don’t have any reason to lie to you. Unlike her. What I don’t understand is why you’d keep covering for her. She’s lied to you all along. She’s using you.”

Frank stared at him. He was squeezing the hand axe hard, and now he started tapping it lightly against his thigh.

Finally he said, “Just by the way you’re babbling I can tell you’re full of shit.”

The man’s cheeks reddened. Frank pressed on: “If I knew a woman like that, I wouldn’t cheat on her, or spy on her, or try to get her arrested for things that I did.”

“She’s got you hoodwinked, I see.”

This was pointless; and yet Frank wasn’t sure how to get away. Possibly the man was armed. But there they were in a public restaurant, out on the sidewalk. Surely he could not be contemplating anything too drastic.

“Why are you bothering me?” Frank said. “What’s she to you? Do you know her? Do you know anything about her? Do you love her?”

Cooper was taken aback; his face reddened further. Thin-skinned people, Frank thought, were so often thin-skinned. “Come off it,” he muttered.