We hung the first sail at four in the morning, because by nine the fabric would be too hot to hold.
Eleven meters of woven white, and it had sat in a warehouse outside Tucson for eight months waiting on a bolt order nobody had signed. Ivo had signed nothing much in his life: a lease, once a petition he’d forgotten the wording of. Now he stood on a ladder at Ninth and Verde with a wrench in his teeth while Ruben held the grommet and swore at the wind.
“Your left,” Ruben said.
“There’s one left.”
“There’s your left and there’s the left that makes it level.”
By six the sail was up, and the sidewalk beneath it measured four degrees cooler than the sidewalk ten meters past it. Ivo had a meter for that. Some days he liked the meter better than the work. It gave you a number, and the number went down.
The city called it the Cool Corridor. On the map it was a green dashed line, seventeen kilometers long, a route you could supposedly walk on the worst day of the year and reach the other side of town still breathing. On the ground it was a patchwork. A sail on one block, nothing on the next. Three misting poles in front of a pharmacy. A designated cool room in the laundromat on Sixty-Third where you could sit for free until eight and nobody would ask you anything.
Funded in 2039 for ninety million. Delivered, so far, at forty-one. The rest was in the queue.
Everybody on the crew knew what the queue meant. It meant the corridor got built outward from the blocks that called their councilmember every summer, and the blocks that didn’t call stayed hot and stayed on the list. Nobody had designed it that way. It had just happened the way things happen when the money is thin and the summer is long.
Ivo’s mother lived inside the queue. Fourteenth and Palo Verde, second floor, curtains closed all day against a sun that did not care about curtains. Marisol was seventy-one and had opinions about ice. If you brought her a bag of it from the gas station she would tell you it was the wrong kind. She wanted the blocks, the cloudy ones, the ones that melted into a puddle in the sink and made the whole kitchen feel like weather.
On a Sunday in August the index hit forty-seven and Ivo drove over with a bag of cloudy ice and a fan he’d fixed from parts. She sat in the dark with a wet towel on the back of her neck and asked him how the walking route was coming.
“It’s coming,” he said.
“How far down is it.”
He didn’t answer. She didn’t ask again. That was the whole argument between them, and it had been the whole argument for two years, and neither of them had ever said it out loud.
The long part of the plan was trees. The city had budgeted for drought-hardy shade trees along the corridor, four hundred of them, a species that would take twenty years to cast anything you could sit under. Everybody on the crew joked about it the same way. That’s a job for your grandkids. Ivo had no grandkids. He had a nephew in Tucson who texted him about basketball.
Then in September a nursery shipment came in mislabeled, two years ahead of schedule, a hundred saplings nobody had room for. The depot said plant them, plant them anywhere along the line, just get them in before the frost. So they did.
Ivo planted his mother’s corner himself, on a Tuesday, on the clock, because the corner was on the line and the line is the line. He dug the hole in ground that was more like a brick than a floor, and he mixed in the amendment, and he set the stick of a tree in it and packed it down and gave it the whole bucket.
It did not look like hope. It looked like a broom handle stuck in a sidewalk cut. It would need water twice a week for three years and shade for the rest of its life.
Marisol came down to look at it. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed and considered the broom handle for a while.
“You’ll be old,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Ivo.
“Older than me. Older than the woman upstairs.”
“Yeah.”
She went back inside. He stood there a minute longer, in the four degrees of nothing, because the sail on Fourteenth wasn’t due for another year and a half and the sun was on his neck.
It was a Tuesday. It was still hot. The numbers in the corridor were still down only where the money had reached, and the queue was still a queue, and the trees would be shade for somebody who hadn’t been born yet, or for a middle-aged man and his mother, if they were lucky, if the water held, if the nursery didn’t send the wrong kind again.
But the number under the sail at Ninth and Verde was four degrees lower than the number in the sun. And the broom handle was in the ground. And that was one installment.