I poked up the long narrow bay filling the Van Cortlandt parkway, west of the Bronx River channel. This was the easiest water route to get to Woodlawn Cemetery, where the boys had supposedly been headed. Uprooted trees looked like dead bodies on the land; floating trees looked like dead bodies in the water. The Bronx? No thonx! The sad borough was big, dead, killed.
I nosed around in narrow flooded streets that somehow did not rise (or sink) to the level of canals, letting off my air horn from time to time in case the boys were still tucked into a shelter somewhere and didn’t see me. I didn’t see why they would do that on a nice day like this, but I tried it anyway. There were a lot of buildings still standing enough to have served as shelter for them, big concrete boxes with broken roofs. Indeed as the day wore on, it became clear from the sheer size of the borough that looking for any one pair of boys was a futile gesture. Pointless, and yet something that someone had to do. Someone; not necessarily me. There were so many ways that the storm could have killed them that I wondered if we would ever know. Drowned, most likely, of course, that being their specialty. Or crushed, second most likely. Bold but stupid. They would have made good traders someday, but oh well. You have to survive your crazy youth to be able to deliver on the promise inherent in that craziness.
A call came to my wrist from Charlotte. “Hey, Frankie boy. They turned up back at the Met.”
“No way!”
“Way.”
“Well, that’s good news. I was never going to find them up here.”
“Especially with them not being there.”
“Right, but even if they had been. This is one big fucking wreck of a place.”
“Always true.”
“Should I pick you up on my way home, do my Boy Scout good deed for the day, help old lady cross street?”
“No, I’ve got to deal with some shit here. Some really shitty shit.”
“Okay, good luck.”
And I backed the bug out of a particularly nasty canal, more or less coated with the floating bodies of little furry creatures drowned in the flood, sad to see, but not as sad as it would have been if our two rebels without a cause had been there among them. And small mammals are usually very reproductive—ineradicable, really—so I saluted the musky stinky dead as I turned, and got myself back down the flooded streets to the narrow bay and then the Harlem River. There I shoved the throttle forward and flew down the flood like a bird, a shearwater to be specific, skimming the waves back toward home. Glorious flight!
Back at the Met I joined the small crowd in the dining hall surrounding the boys, who were stuffing themselves as if they had the proverbial hollow leg. They looked up at me like raccoons peering out of a dumpster, and I had a sudden vision of them belly-up in the Bronx with their furry brothers and sisters.
“What the fuck!” I said. “Where were you guys?”
“Glad to see you too,” Roberto mumbled through a mouthful of something.
Stefan swallowed and said, “Thanks for looking for us, Mr. Garr. We were up in the Bronx.”
“We knew that,” I said. “Or we thought we did. How about you carry your wristpad with you from now on?”
They both nodded as they continued to eat.
I stared at them. They looked starved but otherwise fine. Thoroughly untraumatized. I had to laugh.
“You must have found a place to hide,” I said.
Stefan swallowed again and drank deeply from a glass of water. “We couldn’t get back to Manhattan because the waves got too big, so we went into the Bronx to those buildings up the creek, and there was an empty warehouse that looked solid and had an open door on its north side that we could get the boat in. Then it was just a matter of waiting it out. It was really loud and windy. And the water rose right up to the attic in this place.”
“Windows broke,” Roberto added between chews. “Lots of windows.”
“Yeah and a lot of them broke outward!” Stefan said. “Some on the south side broke inward, but on the north side they mostly broke outward!”
“Like in a tornado,” Mr. Hexter said. He was sitting next to the boys watching them like a mother cat. “The wind puts a vacuum drag on them and sucks them right out of there.”
The boys nodded. “That happened,” Stefan confirmed. “But there was an inner set of rooms in this warehouse attic, so we just waited in there.”
“Didn’t you get cold?”
“Not too cold. There was some insulation under the roof, and some paper left in file cabinets. We made like a giant bed of paper, and stuck ourselves in it from the side.”
“Didn’t you get thirsty?” I asked.
“We did. We drank some of the river water there.”
“No way! Didn’t you get sick?”
“Not yet.”
“Didn’t you get hungry?” Hexter asked.
They both nodded, mouths again full. By way of further answer Roberto pointed at his cheek. When he swallowed again, he said, “We actually thought if we should try to kill and eat some muskrats that were in there with us.”
“Muskrats?”
“I think so. Either muskrats or really wet weasels. Like long skinny otters?”
“There were a lot of rats and insects too,” Stefan added after swallowing. “Snakes, frogs, spiders, you name it. It was really creepy.”
“In that there were lots of things creeping,” Roberto clarified. “But the muskrats were the ones that got our attention.”
Hexter said, “There’s lots of muskrats around the bay. Or they could have been minxes. There’s otters too.”
“Not otters,” Roberto said. “Whatever they were, there was a group of them, a family or something. Five big ones and four small ones. They swam into the warehouse and then they were in the rooms down the hall, mostly. They checked us out. All the other littler things stayed away from them. And from us. Arm’s length anyway.”
“Actually the muskrats were wondering if they could eat us,” Stefan said. “We were wondering if we could catch and eat one of them, and they were wondering the same thing about us!”
The two boys laughed. “It was pretty funny,” Roberto confirmed. “They weren’t very big, but there were more of them than us. So we yelled at them.”
“They squeaked at us.”
“Yeah they did, but they ran away too.”
“Well, they flinched. They didn’t run very far. They were still thinking it over. But we picked up some plumber’s wrenches we found and threatened them.”
“But we decided not to kill one and eat it. We didn’t want to piss the others off. They have really sharp teeth.”
“Yeah they do. If they had all gone for us at once it could have been bad. They could have took us, probably.”
Stefan nodded. “That’s why we yelled. We screamed at them so loud I hurt my voice. My throat was raw.”
“Mine too.”
I looked at them telling their story, thinking these boys could definitely grow up to become traders. Some days, when I have to convince some asshole to pay me what they owe, I have ended up with my throat raw from screaming over the phone. If you get a reputation for being a soft creditor it can incent other borrowers to default strategically, so you need to be able to scream sometimes to good effect. “Good job, boys,” I said. “And your boat was okay?”
“Yeah, we had it down in the big main room of this warehouse. It got squished up against the ceiling at high water, there was so much water it was unbelievable, but then it just stayed stuck up there until the water went down. That was some high tide!”