The other difference was, the lawyer knew bureaucracy and politics and policy. When the Federal government touched this part of Maine only while the roads were open, and when they hadn’t been open much this year, he became a cipher. Jim Farrell knew useful things, like which root vegetables had the shortest growing seasons and how to salt trout or make sauerkraut. He knew, and he talked. Oh, yes—he talked. And talked and talked some more.
He got to his feet now. Instead of the more common stocking cap, he wore a snap-brim fedora. His pearl-gray topcoat was of a cut reckoned elegant when FDR decided we had nothing to fear but fear itself: some years before he was born, in other words. He wasn’t young, but he wasn’t so old as that. He was a dandy with antique tastes.
He had a ruddy Irish face with a pointed nose and bushy eyebrows. The first time Rob met him, the winter before, he’d been reminded of a smaller version of John Madden, but only till Farrell opened his mouth. Madden had a mouth full of gravel. Jim Farrell’s baritone was a very different instrument. He spoke in sentences that parsed and paragraphs where the sentences followed logically, one upon another. That should have ruled out a successful political career for him, and as a matter of fact it had—till the supervolcano erupted.
“Here we are again,” he said as he took McCann’s place at the pulpit. “Here we are again, all right, in this, the second winter of our discontent. The first one was pretty easy, as these things go. We chopped down the trees that stood closest, and we shot the nearest and stupidest moose.”
People chuckled. It wasn’t that Farrell was saying anything that wasn’t so. They’d done exactly that the winter before. They’d got by with it, too, until things thawed out enough to remind the wider world for a little while that they were there.
“I’m serious,” Farrell insisted, “or as serious as I’m likely to get, anyhow. I’m serious, and the situation is liable to turn critical. If we don’t want to end up burning down our houses to keep warm and eating long pig so we don’t starve, we’d better do some planning first.”
Rob wondered how many of the men and women in the crowd understood what long pig was. Sitting next to him, Justin quirked an eyebrow, so he got it. Well, Justin knew all kinds of weird things. Knowing weird things was his specialty, maybe even more than playing guitar. And Dick Barber also grinned out of one side of his mouth. But he too was a man of parts, even if not all of them worked all the time. And he would have heard more from Farrell than anybody. For most of these folks, though, long pig would be caviar to the general. Then Rob wondered how many people here knew about caviar to the general. And then he quit worrying about crap like that and listened to Farrell some more.
“—got to organize and share what we can gather,” the retired history prof was saying. “If we don’t hang together, you can be sure we will hang separately.”
That was Ben Franklin. Before Rob could even start to wonder how many people in the church knew that much, somebody called, “I thought you were a Republican, not a goddamn Commie!”
Farrell beamed. He loved hecklers, mostly because he loved demolishing them. Before Mayor McCann could gavel the loudmouth out of order, Farrell waved for him not to bother. “Right this minute, I think Moscow and Beijing and Pyongyang are a little too cold themselves to worry about Maine north of the Interstate.” He got his laugh. Having got it, he went on, “At least, I don’t think North Korea has a rocket that will reach all the way to such a dangerous place as Guilford.”
That won him another one. “Washington doesn’t worry about us, either. We’ve seen that. And I am a Republican, so I say that’s a good thing more often than not. I don’t want Big Brother watching me. But I also don’t want my friends and neighbors squabbling like the Kilkenny Cats, and I don’t want them starving or freezing, either. If we can take care of ourselves, we won’t need to cry because Big Brother’s falling down on the job. All politics is local, but some is more local than others. For about nine months out of the year, maybe more, ours looks as though it’s going to be about as local as it gets.”
He went on to talk about schemes for using the gasoline and fuel oil they did have, and about organizing hunts and woodcutting parties. He talked about parsnips and mangel-wurzels and Andean potatoes that ripened faster than the varieties of spuds Maine had been famous for.
“What the hell is a mangel-wurzel?” Rob whispered to Justin.
“You grab a wurzel and you hurt it real bad,” Justin explained, so he had no clue, either.
“None of this will be exciting,” Farrell finished. “But we’re not talking about excitement now. Excitement is for good times. It’s a luxury. We’re talking about survival. Survival is what we’ll be talking for the rest of my life, for the rest of your lives, and probably for the rest of your children’s and grandchildren’s lives. I don’t think Washington has figured that out yet, but it looks pretty obvious here, doesn’t it?”
Nobody, not even the guy who’d yelled at him, tried to tell him he was wrong. No one applauded when Farrell stepped away from the pulpit—the bully pulpit, Rob thought—either. The thoughtful silence he got seemed higher praise than any mere handclapping could have been. And the agenda items following his talk seemed even duller than they might have otherwise.
After the town meeting adjourned, Rob waded through the crowd around Jim Farrell and waited his turn to talk. When it finally came, he asked, “Why aren’t the Feds paying more attention to us? We’re hit harder than any place that didn’t get covered in ash.”
“Well, for one thing, a lot of places did get covered in ash,” Farrell replied, and Rob nodded. The older man continued, “And Washington is out for what it can get, much more than it is for what it can give. From us, that means it’s out for nothing. You can’t get blood from a turnip, or from a mangel-wurzel. So Washington shines the light of its countenance on the places that are still warm, or at least warmer.”
That made more sense than Rob wished it did. He was less convinced than Farrell that being forgotten about by Washington was a good thing. But he wasn’t nearly so sure it was a bad thing as he had been when Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles first got stuck in Guilford. He let someone else talk to Farrell and walked out into the sharp-toothed cold outside.
It was dark outside the church, too—no working streetlamps. Rob stepped on somebody’s foot before he’d gone very far. “Sorry,” he said, wondering who his victim was.
“No damage,” came the reply: a woman’s voice. She couldn’t see him, either, because she asked, “Who are you?”
“Rob. I’m one of the fellows staying at the Mansion Inn.”
“Oh, from the band!” she said. “You guys are good, even acoustic. I like it when you play in the park by the river. I go whenever I can.”
“Cool,” Rob replied. A fan—he recognized enthusiasm when he heard it. But which fan? “Um, who’m I talking to?”
“Oh. I’m Lindsey Kincaid. I teach chemistry at Piscataquis Community Secondary School,” she answered. That was the high school not far from the inn.
Rob sortakinda knew who she was, the way he sortakinda knew an awful lot of people here. About his age, halfway between blonde and brunette . . . not half bad, all thing considered. How much considering did he feel like? “Where do you live?” he asked. “Can I walk you back there, wherever it is?”
If she said no, he wouldn’t get shot down too badly. But she said, “Okay,” and sounded pleased saying it. So maybe he’d find out how much considering he felt like.
* * *
“Attention! Attention! May I have your attention, please!”
When a man with a bullhorn shouted for your attention, you gave it to him whether you wanted to or not. He didn’t even have to say please. Vanessa Ferguson wondered why he bothered. Vestigial politeness, was her guess. Like the human tailbone, it was shrunken and useless, but the FEMA guy out there still had that little
bit.
He blared away: “Camp Constitution is being adversely impacted by the flood-type conditions currently obtaining in this geographical location.”
That was so bad, Vanessa almost liked it. She couldn’t imagine a more bureaucratic way to say The flood here is screwing Camp Constitution to the wall.
Things had been bad the spring before. Ash and dust covered the basins of the rivers that flowed into the Mississippi from the west. She still remembered what a pool-service guy had told her mother when she was a kid: “Your pool is the lowest part of your yard, lady. Anything that can get into it goddamn well will.” He’d had a cigarette twitching in the corner of his mouth, and he was tanned as Cordoban leather. These days, he was probably dead of melanoma or lung cancer.
Which didn’t make him wrong. The rivers were the lowest parts of their big back yards, too. They’d flooded last year from all the volcanic crud rain and melting snow and wind dumped into them. Now they were doing it again, still more crud going into riverbeds that hadn’t yet got rid of everything from the year before. And so the rivers—including the Mississippi itself, which was after all the ultimate channel for half a continent’s worth of gunk—were spilling over their banks and spreading out across the countryside.
It wasn’t dramatic, the way the tsunamis in Indonesia and Japan had been. There weren’t huge, speeding walls of water smashing everything in their path. But in the end, how much difference did that make? Whether you went under with a smash or merely a dispirited glub, under you went.
“Evacuation procedures are likely to become necessary for implementation in the nearly immediate future,” the flunky with the bullhorn bellowed. Not just an evacuation, mind you, but evacuation procedures. That made it official, to say nothing of officious. “Gather your belongings and prepare to be in compliance with all instructional directives. National Guard personnel will assist in ensuring prompt satisfaction of requirements.”
They’ll shoot you if you don’t do what we tell you. They would, too. The National Guard had opened fire in the camp several times. Like Vanessa, lots of refugees were armed, but not many had assault rifles or body armor or military discipline. The Guard outclassed them.
“What the fuck they gonna do to us now?” grumbled a middle-aged black man a couple of tiers of bunks over from Vanessa.
“Waddaya think, Jack?” a woman said in tones that came from Long Island, or possibly the Jersey shore. “They’re gonna do whatever they damn well wanna.”
And that was about the size of it. Vanessa hoped the waters would close over Micah Husak. She hoped crawdads and sticklebacks and little fish whose names she didn’t even know would pick out his dead eyes and nibble the rotting flesh off his toes—and off his dick. All the while, she understood it was a hopeless hope. That kind of shit didn’t happen to the people who ran camps. It happened to the people who wound up stuck in them.
Gathering her belongings didn’t take long. Everything she owned fit in her purse and in a dark green garbage bag. That seemed fitting enough and then some, because most of what she owned was garbage.
Off in the distance, an M16 barked: a quick, professional three-round burst. Whoever’d been giving some Guardsman grief would just have discovered he’d made his last dumbass mistake. Or maybe he was too high on crank even to notice he was dead. Methamphetamines and weed fired people up and mellowed them out all over the camp.
The yahoo with the bullhorn ordered the people in the tent next to Vanessa’s out to comply with his instructional directives. The middle-aged black guy moaned. “I didn’t used to think there was no place worse’n this,” he said. “But what you want to bet they went and found one?”
“Made one,” Vanessa corrected. The difference sounded tiny, but seemed profound to her.
Then, half an hour later, the bell—or the bullhorn—tolled for them. “Tent 27B inmates, assemble outside the entrance in a single-file line,” the guy with it boomed. Vanessa wondered if he would lead them to the Department of Redundancy Department. She didn’t make the joke. She didn’t think anyone else in good old Tent 27B would get it. Too bad, but there you were. And here she was.
Nervous-looking Guardsmen held their rifles in positions from which they could open up in a hurry. There were a lot of them. How much trouble had they had evacuating other great big tents? Quite a bit, by all the signs.
“Follow me toward the transportation that will transport you to the new provisional facilities,” Bullhorn Boy continued. “Obey all commands immediately.” That was so plain, it could only mean Don’t screw with me—or else.
Off they went, at a retarded shuffle, garbage sacks slung over their shoulders. Up ahead, people were slowly filing onto buses ancient enough to have carried kids back in the days when Southern schools were still segregated.
Vanessa made up her mind right there that she didn’t want to get transported to any provisional facility. Camp Constitution was bad. A half-assed version would only be worse. They said it couldn’t be done, but as often as not they didn’t know what they were talking about. This looked like one of those times.
Off to one side stood a much shorter row of newer, less decrepit buses. The people getting into those also seemed newer and less decrepit than the ones boarding the wrecks toward which Vanessa was heading. Pointing at the newer buses, she asked one of the Guardsmen, “What’s up with those?”
He was a squarely built, blocky fellow with beard stubble so dark and thick he probably had to shave twice a day. “Oh, those are for the reclamation parties,” he answered.
“Huh?” Vanessa said brilliantly.
“Reclamation parties,” the Guardsman repeated. “You know, to go into the country the eruption fucked over and scavenge stuff from it and start cleaning it up so it’s, like, worth something again.”
“How do I get on one of those buses?” Vanessa asked. If you were cleaning up the countryside, you weren’t living in a camp. Not living in a camp seemed the most wonderful thing in the world to her, the way El Dorado must have to the conquistadors.
The guy looked at her. “You shoulda signed a volunteer sheet. They went around, like, weeks ago.”
“Sign one? I never even saw one!” Vanessa yipped. She wondered if that was so. All kinds of stupid administrative papers circulated through the tents and FEMA trailers. Like most of the other poor slobs stuck in Camp Constitution, she ignored them. If she’d ignored the wrong one, she’d just screwed herself to the wall. But even if saying she’d never seen one might not be true, it was definitely truthy. She sure hadn’t paid attention to one.
“If you didn’t sign up, you can’t go on those buses. You gotta get on these ones instead.” The Guardsman pointed in the direction she was already going with the muzzle of his assault rifle.
Full of helpless longing, Vanessa stared at the newer buses. Helpless? God helped those who helped themselves. “I’d do anything to get on one of those buses,” she said in a low, breathy voice she didn’t remember using since before she threw out her last boyfriend.
If she hadn’t taken care of Micah Husak that way, chances were she would have kept quiet. But after you’d done it once, the second time turned out to be a lot easier. She had a weapon, and she’d use it, the way the Guardsman would use the M16 if he needed to.
He understood what she was offering, all right. Well, he didn’t exactly need to be Phi Beta Kappa to figure it out. “Yeah?” he said, as people not so young, not so cute, and maybe not so desperate trudged past so they could go from a godawful camp to one that had to be even worse.
“Yeah,” Vanessa said. The fish had taken the bait.
“Joe-Bob, keep an eye on the parade,” her Guardsman said to the fellow next to him. Then he turned back to her. “C’mon in here.” In here was into a tent that had already been evacuated. He beckoned to her as he undid his fly. “Let’s just make it quick, okay?”
/> “Okay.” She got down in front of him. Blowing him was better than fucking him. She wouldn’t have to worry about dressing again—or about getting knocked up. He would have been better right after a shower, but he could have been worse, too.
And it would be quick. She could tell as soon as she started. “Yeah, babe,” he muttered, shoving his hips forward and thrusting deeper into her mouth. Coughing, she pulled away a little, then went back to what she was doing.
He was about to go off. Just when she was going to jerk away so he’d spurt on the ground, he grabbed her head and held her to him while he came in her mouth. It was as bad as she remembered. She gagged and choked and almost puked on his sand-colored Army boots.
“All right,” he said as he let her go. Eyes watering, she spat out as much of the gross, sticky stuff as she could. He chuckled and ran his hand through her hair: affection now, not brute strength. Why shouldn’t he feel affectionate? She’d given him what he wanted. “You better hustle if you’re gonna get on the reclamation bus,” he told her.
“You bet I am,” she said grimly. She spat again as she climbed to her feet and brushed dirt off the knees of her jeans. The Guardsman chuckled some more. He could afford to think it was funny. He hadn’t been on the receiving end.
She fled the tent and hustled toward the newer buses before she realized they hadn’t even found out each other’s names. That came closer to the famous zipless fuck than she’d ever dreamt she’d get. She hadn’t got fucked, though. She literally hadn’t even got kissed.
She spat one more time before she got into the boarding line. She wished for a jug of Scope, but wishing failed to produce one. The taste lingered. As she took her place, the woman in front of her—a gal about her own age—gave her a curious look, but didn’t say anything.
A man with a clipboard was making checkmarks on the paper it held. A roster sheet? Vanessa’s heart sank. If she’d sucked off that National Guard asshole for nothing . . . “Ferguson,” she said with more confidence than she felt.
Supervolcano: All Fall Down Page 11
