"That's 20 to 30 below. Average winter lows."

  Jesse shrugged. "I'm not growing it. It's growing by itself. I just plunked a few of these in the ground. The other ones died. That's all I know." He paused, looking from the plant to Gene. "Kind of thought you might find it interesting. In your line of work."

  "It is very interesting," said Gene. He pronounced each syllable carefully. "It is very interesting indeed."

  WOUNDED KING

  Gene stepped up to the door of his boss's office brandishing a somewhat overexposed Polaroid image of a saw palmetto growing unprotected in Applemont, Maine. Before he could even knock, Chas called to him:

  "Deere, is that you? Shut that door behind you, if you would."

  Chas was the sort of person whom, when he is being polite, you have to be wary around. Gene stepped into the large, almost empty polyhedron of executive space—chosen probably on the basis of square footage rather than on its intrinsic architectural merits, of which none were detectable. One quick look at Chas's face and he quietly slipped the Polaroid into his shirt pocket.

  Chas beamed a beefeater's smile at him. "Been doing a bit of field work, have you?"

  Gene glanced down at the lower portions of his body, where latte-toned mud caked his boat shoes and continued a good distance up his chinos.

  "All in the position description," he said.

  "Fine, that's fine." Chas seemed to have forgotten what they were talking about. "Have a seat over there, won't you?"—pointing to a deck chair safely away from the kilim rug mat ameliorated a minor fraction of the concrete floor. "I've got some big news and some medium-sized news and some baby news. Which would you like first?"

  Gene settled into the canvas sling, which was not comfortable. Why have deck chairs if you haven't got a deck? He said, "Maybe you should start small and work your way up."

  "Fine."

  Chas came around his desk and perched himself on the edge of it, a position he seemed to find sympathetic. On the wall behind him hung a row of nicely framed oil paintings of dogs.

  "Baby news," said Chas. He raised a finger to signal the numeral 1. "AIDS Walk. This Saturday. Dublin Village, downtown, starts at noon. Important to ensure that the Company is well and conspicuously represented. Nuff said?"

  Gene felt an urge to jot some notes. "Is that in the position description too?" he asked. Smiling hard, so Chas could tell he was joking.

  "Thank you for your spirit of cooperation, Deere. Are we ready to proceed?"

  Gene sighed. Chas took this, correctly, to mean Yes. He raised two fingers, which could not possibly have been a gesture of peace.

  "Medium-sized news," he said. "Replanting program. Ongoing evaluation of the trial plots. Report and recommendations needed from you ASAP. Decision to be made at the next regional staff meeting. Which, as you ought to know, is scheduled for July 1st."

  Gene frowned. "Isn't that a little ... rigid? I mean, timetable-wise? I wasn't expecting to have to make a final decision that quickly."

  "You don't make the final decision," Chas reminded him. "You make recommendations. Decisions are made at a Higher Level."

  "Thanks," said Gene. (Only a day job.) "But my understanding was, we'd keep an eye on things at least through the remainder of this growth season. Then we'd have fall and winter to—"

  "The world turns," Chas said. "Time waits for no one, as I believe Mick Jagger observed. The Company has made a commitment—" He paused, adjusted his position on the edge of the desk, as though he were shifting into Ex Cathedra mode. "The Company has made a commitment to plant twenty million trees next spring in the Northeastern Sector. Twenty million, Deere."

  Chas pressed his hands together, a gesture something like a yogi concentrating his energies for some act of major-league spirituality.

  "That's a very meaningful number. That's a number that represents the seriousness of the Company's involvement in the ongoing reforestation of the North Woods. Do you hear what I'm saying?"

  Gene wasn't sure. He heard enough to make him suspect that there was a good deal more he wasn't being told.

  "And in order to make good on that commitment," Chas went on, "it is of paramount importance that we settle firmly upon a unified planting strategy. That we do so at the earliest possible date. And that we then take immediate steps to push it through."

  Something about this choice of words seemed odd, Gene thought. "Unified strategy?" he repeated, like a kid trying out a bit of newly learned vocabulary.

  "Unified," Chas affirmed. "Region-wide."

  "I'm not really sure," Gene said hesitantly, "that a unified strategy is possible. Or that it's a sound idea, scientifically. You've got a pretty diverse region here, when you really look at it. Especially if we're talking also about the Maritimes."

  "We're talking region-wide," said Chas. He appeared to like the sound of this.

  "Right. So. The best plan is probably going to involve a contoured, sector-specific planting scheme. We've got lots of variables to play with—species mix, weed control methodology, desired time to harvest. And on and on. So I figure, we might as well give ourselves the benefit of all that freedom to customize our approach."

  Chas held his arms up with the palms facing out, as though Gene were pointing a gun at him. "Fine, fine," he said. "That sounds like exactly the sort of thing that should go into your report. Be sure to state your recommendations clearly in order of preference—A, B, C, and so forth. And remember to address the option of a unified stand of X-4.3.2." Chas raised a wrist, shooting the cuff so he could look at his watch. He punched a little button to activate the calendar function. "Now let's see. I'd like that report on my desk no later than the last week of June, if you can swing it. That would be, it looks like, the 23rd."

  Gene opened his mouth. He wasn't sure whether he was at a loss for something to say, or whether he had so many things to say that the problem was where to start. In the end he let his mouth fall shut again. That is surely what Chas would have advised him to do.

  Three executive fingers went up.

  "Now," said Chas, "big news." He clapped his hands together. It was like a toy gun popping off in the metal-and-concrete room. "Guess who's coming to town?"

  Gene could not imagine. "Sydney Poitier?"

  Chas scowled. Then his smile buoyed up again. He turned, pointing at the row of portraits on the back wall.

  Let me guess, thought Gene. "A border collie is coming to town?"

  His tone of voice must have been comically idiotic, because Chas exclaimed, "Oh, for mercy's sake, man." He aimed his finger more precisely. And at last Gene got the picture.

  Centered between the dogs-in-oil was a somewhat larger (though less majestically framed) likeness of Burdock Herne, Esquire, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Gulf Atlantic Corporation. His tanned, tax-sheltered and stock-optioned head seemed to glow with an immanent celestial light. Closer inspection revealed this to be caused by an Itty Bitty Nite Lite that Chas had cannily fastened just over the portrait.

  "Nice job," said Gene.

  "If you can keep it," Chas rejoined: a rare, apparently spontaneous remark.

  "Herne is coming to Maine?" Gene said.

  "Not just Maine, Deere. He's coming here—this very facility. This room, I shouldn't wonder. He expects to be briefed on the status of our operations. And I'm sure he'll want to know where we expect to be, say, 12 months from now, 24 months from now. The whole down-year perspective."

  Gene reflected that in the context of the life of a forest, or even a tree plantation, 24 months did not constitute much of a perspective. But at least now he understood where the pressure for a quick decision was coming from.

  "Have you met him before?" he asked Chas.

  "Met him?"

  Chas seemed to consider what Gene meant by the verb to meet. Gene supposed this was an Eskimos-have-11-words-for-snow kind of thing.

  Chas said, "We spoke briefly during the Cancun retreat. That was year before last."

  A cloud passed over the executive countenance. Chas had not, as the in-house saying went, made the retreat last year. Invitations for the over-Christmas trip to Cancun were handed out in mid-December to the previous year's top performers. Burdock Herne was said to personally draw up the guest list. It was the most anxiously awaited of the Company's annual rites; and it had the titillating subplot that none of the executive-tier employees knew more than a week in advance whether or not they would be spending the holiday with their families.

  "Has Herne got a family?" Gene wondered.

  Chas gave him a quick, probing look. "Why do you ask?"

  Gene shrugged. "Oh, you know. All those holidays down in Mexico. Doesn't he celebrate Christmas?"

  "Everybody celebrates Christmas," said Chas, whose Episcopalianism was probably cemented in his genes. A nontransposable nucleotide sequence. Gene smiled. Chas frowned. "He's got a teenage daughter," he said. "The word is, she's a bit of a problem."

  "Problem?"

  Chas gave him a serious, confidential sort of look. "The usual thing. Drugs. Music. Clothes. Sex, I suppose. And now the obligatory running away from home."

  "Mm," said Gene. "Music and clothes. Sounds terrible."

  Chas nodded, distantly. "The word is, he's been quite upset over it."

  "Herne?" said Gene.

  "Isn't that who we're talking about?" Chas walked around his desk and stood before the official portrait, which was mounted high enough that you had to stare slightly upward at it. "The word is," he said thoughtfully, "he hasn't been acting like himself lately. He's been brooding. Delegating important decisions to the regional managers. Walking out in the middle of board meetings. Not at all his usual style."

  Gene said, "So, is the daughter all right?"

  "Who? Oh. I suppose so. Kids are all right, usually. In the long run. I'm sure she'll grow out of it. Meanwhile, it's all having an impact on the well-being of this Company."

  "I see," said Gene. He did see. He rather wished he did not.

  "Well." Chas clapped his hands again. "Enough about that. Have we covered everything?"

  What mean we, Kemosabe? Gene stood up and said, "So you want my report by—"

  "June 23rd."

  "June 23rd. Isn't that Midsummer Night?"

  Chas's handsome face was expressionless. After a long moment he said, "I have absolutely no idea."

  Gene took care to place one mud-caked shoe on a corner of the kilim rug. Before he could get away, however, Chas called: "Oh, and Deere. Start wearing a beeper, won't you? If you're going to be spending all your time away from the office, I'd like to be able to track you down."

  And what, thought Gene—eat me? He returned Chas's amiably carnivorous smile.

  HYSTRIX HYSTERICS

  Sefyn couldn't believe his eyes.

  "It's lovely," he said, cradling the Polaroid in both hands. "I can't believe it didn't defoliate worse than this. Do you suppose the snow cover protects it?"

  "That's a thought," said Gene. It was a great relief to be back in his own little corner of the wide world, where a sense of proportion still obtained. "I ought to have asked him about that. It was down in a sort of hollow, so there could have been some drifting."

  Sefyn nodded excitedly. His eyes darted between Gene and the photograph. "We must go pay it a visit," he said.

  Gene wondered if he would be able to find his way back. "Da Turtle's Hostel," he said quietly.

  "I've tried to grow these indoors, you know," Sefyn said. "But I can't get the right combination of sun and humidity and heavy soil. Rain forest types are so much easier."

  "Easier than natives?" said Gene.

  "Oh, much. People don't know how difficult it is to grow native plants properly. This may be a weed down in Florida, but try growing it in a tub in your living room, and honey, it's all over."

  "It's not actually a weed in Florida," said Gene. "Not anymore. Most of its habitat has been improved, as the saying goes. I believe it may actually have been proposed for listing as threatened. But that was before Property Rights."

  Sefyn shook his head. He handed the Polaroid back. "Maybe that's not so bad, though," he said, "if you can really grow it in Maine."

  "You can grow it. At least, that guy Openhood can grow it."

  Sefyn sighed. "I've known people like that. Who could just stick anything in some dirt, and it would take off."

  "Ah yes. The proverbial green thumb." Gene peered into the blurry Polaroid. "Personally, I can't keep a damned mother-in-law's tongue alive."

  "Well, of course not," said Sefyn. "You're a botanist. You've learned too many scientific facts. You know about molecules and all. That's the worst thing you can possibly do, if you want to grow anything."

  "It is?"

  Sefyn gave him a kindly, sympathetic look. "Here," he said. "Want to help me water?"

  "Sure."

  Sefyn handed him a long-spouted Haws watering can. "Give them all they want," he said.

  Gene kept the obvious question to himself. He tilted the can over a strapping Azorina vidalii, which looked like a cross between a Canterbury bell and a Mayan-temple bromeliad.

  "Sefyn?" he said.

  "I'm listening." His administrative assistant was lost in a thicket of abutilon.

  "Do you know anything about bears?"

  "Sure do." From deep within the mass of greenery, sunlight falling through the skylight flashed on Sefyn's large gold hoop earring.

  "Some days you eat the bear," he said.

  "And some days the bear

  eats you."

  or

  should we call the whole thing off?

  * * *

  Ludi asked herself. Only four of the Street Players bothered to turn out for the No Shit Emergency Planning Meeting with two weeks to go, now, before Midsummer Night. Furthermore, as to the four who had showed up, there were serious questions about the extent of their true motivation. Gathered in the field behind the sagging rented barn were:

  EBEN CREEK whose place it was;

  PIPPA REDE who was on her way home from Midcoast Human Resources with little WINTERBELLE;

  DEEP HERB who was severely personality-deficient; and

  LUDI SKEISTAN who might be doing this just to show up Guillermo

  Not much to work with. Plus: Ludi's scenario was in tatters. Nobody had come up with a better idea. And last week's drenching rain had gotten into the barn and ruined most of the masks.

  The weather today, on the other hand, was perfect. Early June in Dublin is your quintessentially iffy time: it can be blustery and cloudy and cold enough to need a wool sweater, or it can be sparkling and sunny and warm enough to flop out naked in the middle of the blueberries. Today it was the latter, though everybody thus far was keeping his clothes on. Ludi had spent the past 15 minutes folding pages of her stillborn script into imaginative shapes, an attempt at origami that failed as completely as the words on the pages had failed to constitute a satisfactory drama. But the folded paper did catch the southwesterly wind nicely and go skipping and gliding down the slope toward the dark blue-green waters of Cold Bay. Out in the channel a large oil tanker painted bright orange was easing itself northward toward the deepwater terminal at Kingport.

  The terminal had been yet another stupid project that neither the Street Players nor their allies among the Green Party/Real Food Co-op/Womyn's Movemynt/Organic Pot Growers Association/and Other Overlapping Losers' Groups had been able to stop or even to slow down. Thus it took its place on a list of other brain-dead but unkillable ideas that included filling wetlands to widen the tourist highway, running a snowmobile trail through "forever wild" Baxter State Park, lifting the No-Wake restriction offshore of the Rachel Carson Wildlife Sanctuary, building condos and a chemically dependent golf course in the Dublin River watershed, and inviting the regional credit card center to transform Glassport Village into a soulless, sterilized, architecturally depressing, privately-policed, low-wage, zero-job-security, high-tech sweatshop.

  But that was the karma of the world.

  So Ludi wondered, Why not give up? Why not disband the Street Players? Or let Guillermo and his self-righteous cadres run the show?

  Ludi sighed. It is genuinely difficult to concoct a work of art about Magic and Happiness and Hope when you feel cynical and bummed-out and pessimistic.

  Deep Herb, who could barely be seen among the tall grass and blueberries, said: "We could like, have maybe a big street party and get the Combat Mammals to play, and we could raise some money selling T-shirts."

  "Raise money?" said Pippa. This was a concept she was unfamiliar with.

  Eben said, "Every time the Combat Mammals play, the police show up."

  "But the cops will already be there," said Herb. "They always come to our performances. It would save everybody a lot of trouble."

  Everybody looked at Deep Herb, or at least the hollow space his body had made in the grass. One of his hands was tracing out patterns in the empty air, or possibly warding off black flies. They were starting to bite now.

  "I don't get it," said Winterbelle.

  Her mommy patted her on the head. "You'll get used to it, honey," she murmured. Her voice sounded dreamy. It was that kind of day.

  "We're supposed to be a theater group," Ludi felt obliged to remind everyone. "If we can't come up with some kind of dramatic presentation, then maybe we should—''

  "Where's your theater?" Winterbelle asked.

  Eben said, "The street is our theater. That's why we're called Street Players."

  "What street?" said Winterbelle.

  "Explain it to her," Eben told Pippa.

  "Explain what?"

  Ludi sighed again. She looked at the scattering of paper across the field. "I don't see how we can do anything at all, the way things are now. With so few of us."

  "You can always do something," said Winterbelle.

  The little girl sat with her back very straight. Her body was wispy, her hair thick and yellow-white, and her eyes an implausibly brilliant blue, so that she had the look of a prepubescent Barbie. Pippa gazed at her daughter fondly and Ludi felt, for the very first time in her life, a stab of primordial womanly instinct—a deeply rooted, inchoate desire to move into a tidy little home with white clapboards and painted trim and beget a brood of human young. Involuntarily she clutched at her stomach, though that was not precisely where the urge was coming from. She avoided looking at either of the two males present, lest in her confused state she should suffer some kind of imprinting. The thought of a house full of Deep Herbs in diapers was too much for a single woman to bear.