Everywhere people were out and about, either looking for things or just living their summer lives. Refugee residents, hanging out all ragged. It was like everyone had been turned into Huck and Pap, or like the whole city had turned into the Street of Fundy on a fast ebb.
“Why didn’t they take over the uptown towers?” Stefan asked the old man.
“They tried and it didn’t work.”
“So what?” Roberto said. “That was only one night! What if they kept trying every day?”
“It doesn’t occur to them.”
“Why not?”
“They call it hegemony.”
“Not another word!”
Hexter laughed at that. “Yes another word. The war of words! Greek in this case, I think.”
“Hedge money? Like Franklin Garr?”
“No, he-ge-mony. Means, hmm… means the agreement of people to being dominated, without guns having to be pointed in your face all the time. Even if you’re treated badly. You just go along with it.”
“But that’s stupid.”
“Well, we’re social animals, I guess you’d have to say.”
“So we’re all stupid, you’re saying. We’re like—”
“We’re like zombies!”
Hexter laughed. “That’s how I always used to think of it. Did you ever see Vampires Versus Zombies? No, you didn’t. A very great movie. The vampires fly around sucking the blood of working people. That’s the best blood to suck. When the workers are drained they turn into zombies, so the vampires fly somewhere else and drop in on a new population, leaving behind the zombies, who stagger around dead at that point.”
“So that would be their he-ge-mony,” Roberto said carefully.
“You are so good. So yeah, more and more people get their blood sucked and turn into zombies, and then when they’re almost all zombies—”
“All but one!”
“All but two.”
“Right, you two. But then the zombies decide it’s time to revolt.”
“About time!”
“Better late than never.”
“Exactly. So the zombies all slouch off toward the vampire castle, determined to invade. But they’re very slow. At first the vampires just laugh. But there’s no new blood for them to suck either, so the vampires are slowing down too. Eventually the whole movie is in slow motion, it’s hilarious. The zombies keep falling apart when they hit somebody, and the vampires can only bite. They’re pretty weak on both sides. As usual the scene goes on too long. But finally the zombies just kind of crush the vampires under the weight of their detached limbs. The end.”
“I want to see that.”
“Me too!”
“Me too,” Hexter said.
As they motored about they kept an eye peeled for wildlife, muskrats in particular, but anything would do. Hexter said, “The Indians figured that bears were the big brothers of beavers, and beavers were the big brothers of muskrats. The bigger ones protected the littler ones, I guess. Or the bigger ones never ate the littler ones.”
“What about otters?”
“Oh no, otters are vicious killers. Playful but vicious.”
“It’s hard to understand how they could kill anything, their mouths are so small.”
“It’s a matter of attitude, I guess. Hey look, there’s a nest up on that cornice. Peregrine falcon, it looks like. They’re so cool.”
“They drop like rocks!”
“Like arrows shot down. I know. So, this is as close to a swamp as we’ve got now, this part of the intertidal at Fifty-fifth and Madison. That’s because it was a swamp, back before the city was here. This was the Kill of Schepmoes, I think. I call it the Two Stooges Swamp. Now it’s kind of come back. You see those willows and alders growing right out of the ground. And the old spring is back to springing.”
“No way.”
“Way. It never stopped. It drains the southeast corner of Central Park. It’s the old watershed, coming back. Which is what gives the beavers in Central Park their chance. Same up at the northeast end of the park. The beavers chew down the alder and willows—”
“With their teeth!”
“That’s right, they are way tougher than vampires, dentally speaking. They chew down entire trees, and weave the trees and branches together until they have a beaver dam, which raises the water some, and slows it down. Then they can build beaver lodges, where you swim up under them to get inside, and when you go high enough inside them it’s dry.”
“That’s very cool.”
“It is. And it also makes homes for muskrats, who move into abandoned beaver lodges, or make their own using old beaver cuttings, mostly. So along with beaver, you get all the kinds of animals and plants that used to live on this island, because the beaver dams anchor that whole community. They get you ponds and swamps, and frogs and aquatic plants and some freshwater fish, and so on. That’s what Eric Sanderson taught us. One of the great New Yorkers. He’s the one who started the Mannahatta Project.”
“Hey look, is that a muskrat there?”
Roberto killed the motor and they drifted with the slow flushing of water in this part of the intertidal. Under the mass of junk at Park and Fifty-fourth, the water was perturbed by small corrugated wakes. “That’s their sign,” Mr. Hexter whispered. “The multiple wakes are from their whiskers. They can kind of smell the water, or feel it, with their whiskers. Ondathra, the Indians here called them. Like a Japanese movie monster. Or musquash. You can smell them, they’re pretty musky. I think this family is rebuilding its push-up. It’s like a beaver lodge but smaller. It sits over the entry to their burrow.”
“But what can they burrow into there?”
“Holes in abandoned buildings.”
“Like the ones we saw in the Bronx!”
“That’s right. They make underwater entrances, but the burrow is aboveground. That’s where they sleep and the moms have their babies and all.”
“Its tail is like a snake!”
“Kind of like. Now see, if you had a camera and a good lens, you could take pictures of these guys and add them to the Mannahatta Project.”
“Inventing atom bombs?”
“Yes. It’s a good group, you guys should join it. You need some kind of project. I say to you what I said before—after finding the Hussar, it’s only downhill for you guys to keep hunting sunken treasure.”
“But what about Melville? He lived right next door to us!”
“That’s true, and it would be nice to put a plaque up or something. Maybe we could talk to the city about doing blue oval plaques, like in England. We would have Melville, and Teddy Roosevelt, and Stieglitz and O’Keeffe, and all kinds of other people. But taking his gravestone from dry land to tideland is probably a bad idea. Really, doing anything underwater at this point is probably a bad idea.”
The boys didn’t like to hear this, but of all the adults in their lives, Mr. Hexter was the one who never told them what to do.
“They’d make you full members of Mannahatta right away. You’d have animals to look for every time you went out. And a lot of the aquaculture pens hate muskrats, because they eat fish if they can get into the cages. So you could go into the business of live-trapping muskrats and moving them away.”
“That might be fun,” Stefan guessed.
“You’ve got to do something,” Mr. Hexter pointed out. “Now that you are men of leisure. It’s a horrible fate to be rich, or so I’ve heard. You have to figure out something useful and entertaining to do, and it isn’t easy.”
“We could map the city!” Stefan suggested.