“Shit,” he said, obscurely pleased.

“Told ya,” Zeno scolded him.

The night was warm and full of spring smells, mixing with the mud stench. Frank was still hot from the frisbee run. Some distant gawking cries wafted up from the ravine, as if peacocks were on the loose. The guys at the next table were laughing hard. The third vet was sitting on the ground, trying to read a Post by laying it on the ground in front of the fitful fire. “You can only see the fire if you lie on the ground, or look right down the smoke hole. How stupid is that?” They rained curses on their miserable fire. Chessman finished boxing his chess pieces and took off.

Zeno said to Frank, “Why didn’t you play him for money, man? Take him five blow jobs to make up for that.”

“Whoah,” Frank said, startled.

Zeno laughed, a harsh ragged bray, mocking and aggressive, tobacco-raspy. “HA ha ha.” A kind of rebuke or slap. He had the handsome face of a movie villain, a sidekick to someone like Charles Bronson or Jack Palance. “Ha ha— what you think, man?”

Frank bagged his dinner boxes and stood. “What if I had beat him?”

“You ain’t gonna beat him.” With a twist of the mouth that added, asshole.

“Next time,” Frank promised, and took off.

Primate in forest. Warm and sweaty, full of food, beer and ouzo; still fully endorphined from running with the frisbee guys. It was dark now, although the park wore the same nightcap of noctilucent cloud it had the night before, close over the trees. It provided enough light to see by, just barely. The tree trunks were obvious in some somatic sense; Frank slipped between them as if dodging furniture in a dark house he knew very well. He felt alert, relaxed. Exfoliating in the vegetable night, in the background hum of the city, the click of twigs under his feet. He swam through the park.