Heat by Michael Cadnum Page B

mike spies use, and how you could hear each yip as the little teeth of the playful creatures took fun bites out of each other.
    I could imagine my father’s voice, what he said on one of our visitations, as the divorce became final. We sat on lawn furniture in his new garden, before the white gravel and the bamboo, before the gardener whose tastes had been celebrated in Sunset Magazine . Georgia wandered among the stands of wild fennel, and if you didn’t know her you would think she wasn’t listening.
    Dad’s landscape in those days had been dry dirt and milkweed, and a cord of firewood snaked over by morning glories. His new house was three stories, with a billiard room and four walk-in closets, a skylight in the master bedroom, and an armed-response security alarm.
    Dad pointed out where his sand garden was going to be, a white empty expanse you could rake into different patterns. He showed me where the river gravel would shape a path through fluttering, decorative grasses.
    â€œAnd we’ll put in a swimming pool,” he said, “with a hot tub, Jacuzzi, twelve-foot deep end.” He touched me, on my hand, the way he does when he is describing an intercepted pass, a wild throw from center field, trying to pass his enthusiasm like an electric current.
    â€œWhat is happening now doesn’t change the way I feel about you,” he said. He turned, speaking toward the shifting, swaying stalks of fennel. “It alters nothing about my feelings for my two girls,” he said.
    He touched my hand again, and rested his fingers there when he added, “It doesn’t change the two of us.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    It was a long walk, the hike to the sea elephants. I imagined my father avoiding eye contact with tattooed skinheads on his way back from breakfast. I imagined the locker-room echoes of the jail. I wished I could send him a mental picture of the scrub jay chattering in the cypress.
    â€œYou haven’t reviewed the larger implications of this sort of activity,” I was saying, talk as a kind of game I play to keep my mind busy. Maybe I wanted to keep convincing Rowan that I was as smart as his traveling debutante, the one who won prizes in calculus.
    â€œLike what?” Rowan played along, placid as a horse.
    The Beals are under contract with Microsoft to expand the Sounds of Nature software. I could easily perceive the fun it would be for a kid in the inner city to double-click on the cow icon and hear a cow moo. But what would happen if the Beals failed to get a sound bite of a killdeer, a bird that lives in the flat marshes in the Bay Area? As a result, when Microsoft decided to issue the next edition of their encyclopedia, the company would omit mention of the killdeer altogether.
    The menu of creatures offered would be limited to the animals who had made the Top One Hundred. And animals that didn’t make any noise at all, the hermit crab, the lawn moth, would be absolutely overlooked. Rowan agreed that this was very true and a real deficiency in the whole idea of sound-replicated nature.
    â€œYou’re creating a skewed universe,” I said.
    His eyelashes were blond in the sunlight.
    I added, “I’m not annoying you, am I?”
    He laughed.
    â€œCarry on,” said Mr. Beal approaching from behind, upbeat but impatient, an army officer wishing the army was all male.
    Sea elephants smell funny, even at a distance. They smell like decay, rotting chicken skin, garbage left too long under the sink. They didn’t smell bad individually. We nearly stumbled on a living sofa, a finned mammal with doe-like eyes, and she nosed the air in our direction with an air of drowsy courtesy. But the crowd of male sea elephants elbowing up and down the beach in the distance needed to have its locker-room cleaned.
    I knew that once the microphones were in place, conversation would enter a cease-fire, so I asked, keeping my voice low, “What would you do if your