How many interrogations had Colin done? However many it was, he heard the words behind the words she said. “Don’t worry about that kind of stuff. I’m not gonna do anything stupid,” he said. “I intend to get shot by an outraged husband at the age of a hundred and three.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Kelly said. “Well, I’ll tell you what. If you’re still around at a hundred and three and I’m still around to know, I give you permission to wander off the reservation—once. Just once. Till then, fuhgeddaboutit, Mister. After that, you can forget about it, too.”
“If I’m still around at a hundred and three, I probably will forget about it right after that,” Colin said. “My folks were pretty good about keeping their marbles, but none of ’em lived that long.”
“Neither did mine,” Kelly answered. “I had a great-grandmother, I think it was, who almost got to a hundred, but she didn’t quite.”
“Hon, what do you think about me hanging it up?” Colin asked.
“I won’t be sorry,” she said. “I’d get nervous every time you went out on a case from now on. I mean, I always knew bad things could happen to you, but nothing ever had, so I didn’t worry about it much. Now… They say, anything that can happen can happen to you. Now I know in my gut that that’s true, not just in my head. I don’t want to get the jitters whenever you stick your nose outside the station.”
He nodded. “About what I thought you’d say. Well, I’d be lying if I told you I wouldn’t be hinky myself. After you get shot once, I don’t see how you can help having the next time in the back of your mind.”
“We’re on the same page there, especially when your arm reminds you you got hit every time you move it,” Kelly said.
“There is that,” Colin agreed. “If I’d just got grazed, the way Rob did a few years ago, I might be able to not think about it. But from what he wrote, that really was a dumb accident. The guy who shot me, he did what he was trying to do. The next jerk who pulled a gun, he’d mean it, too.”
“Uh-huh. He sure would,” Kelly said. “So I’m happy you’re going to retire, as long as you think you won’t literally get bored to death once you stop going to the cop shop.”
“Nope. Not me,” Colin said. “The only thing that gripes me about it is that I’ve got to hang ’em up. I’m not doing it because I want to. It’s kind of like the so-and-so with the AK won.”
“Like hell it is!” Kelly exclaimed. “He’s dead. He’s pushing up the daisies. He’s pining for the fjords, for Christ’s sake. This is an ex–armed robber.” She did a lousy British accent, but she gave it her best shot.
And she pried a laugh out of her husband. “Thank you, Monty,” he said.
“Any time,” she told him.
He put his good arm around her. “The company will be better here than it would be at the station—I’ll tell you that. Prettier, too.”
“Flattery will get you—somewhere, probably.”
“I was hoping it would.”
“Maybe not right now, though,” she said when he got grabby.
“You’re no fun,” he grumbled. If he’d kept grabbing, Kelly might have gone along with it. Now that Marshall was back in the house, he was keeping an eye on Deborah right this minute. But Colin didn’t push it. He was pretty good about not making a nuisance of himself too often. From what Kelly knew of men, that was as much as a woman married to one of the creatures could reasonably hope for. He did say, “If I’m home all the time, I’ll drag you down in the bushes whenever I get the chance.”
“Promises, promises,” she said. They both laughed. That they could both laugh about it, she figured, spoke well for the state of their marriage.
XXII
Spring came to Guilford on little cat feet, like the fog in the poem. On the calendar, it arrived at the end of the third week in March. Except on the calendar, that meant diddly-squat. From what longtime locals told Rob, the vernal equinox hadn’t meant much in Guilford even before the supervolcano erupted. You could get snow into April, once in a while even into May.
These days, you could get snow into July, even into August. Snow—it’s not just for winter any more! Rob thought it made a terrific advertising slogan. For some reason or other—he couldn’t fathom why—it never caught on the way he wanted.
But, around half past May, the weather slowly began to gain on the calendar’s claims. It could still snow any old time. But it mostly didn’t snow all the goddamn time, as it did in the no-shit winter months. Daytime temps crawled above freezing. Sometimes, instead of snowing, it rained. The drifts that had covered the ground for so long started to melt. That happened first on south-facing slopes that got whatever sunshine sneaked past the clouds. Shadowed stretches stayed snowy longer.
Before the supervolcano blew, Maine had been a birders’ paradise. All kinds of feathered critters came here to raise families and gorge on the bazillions of bugs that hatched out as ponds and swamps unfroze. The unfreezing took longer and was less certain now. There were fewer bugs. Anyone who’d ever had Maine mosquitoes turn his face to steak tartare didn’t miss them a bit. The birds did, though. Only the hardier kinds came here for the abbreviated summer now. They found the times cold and hungry.
Well, Rob found the times cold and hungry, too. He was down to about 165 pounds. On a six-one frame, that wasn’t much. Jeans that had fit him fine once upon a time hung loose these days. He was about twenty pounds under what he’d weighed when he came to Guilford. He used holes in his belt he’d never thought about in the old days.
By pre-eruption standards, almost everybody north and west of the Interstate was skinny. People worked harder. If you had to go somewhere, you walked or skied or snowshoed. If you needed firewood, you chopped it. You didn’t—you couldn’t—hop in the car to go three blocks to the drugstore and another block to the Subway for a meatball sub with marinara.
Rob wondered when he’d last seen a tomato. Some canned ones had come in since the eruption—he was sure of that. Fresh tomatoes? Not even all of Jim Farrell’s magic with greenhouses would persuade them to grow in what passed for a climate around here these days.
Plenty of things wouldn’t grow. But some would. Some had: turnips and other roots, some of the extra-cold-weather potatoes for which they also had Jim to thank, onions, and, in the greenhouses, things like lettuce and garlic. Along with game and pigs and chickens, they meant the people in these parts might be skinny, but few were in any real danger of starving.
Rob ambled east past the Shell station. That wasn’t one of the many businesses that had gone belly-up since the eruption. Mort Willard, the fellow who’d run it as a gas station, was a skilled repairman, mechanic, and handyman. He could fix damn near anything, and did, often using the tools that had once performed surgery on automobiles.
Ralph O’Brian no longer worked for Mort. He made what living he made by chopping wood and shoveling snow and doing other things that needed a strong back but not a whole lot of brains. Rob felt a certain amount of Schadenfreude about that. He knew Ralph hadn’t shot him on purpose. Ralph had been aiming for the moose. He’d got a musician only by accident. Then again, Rob would carry that scar on his calf for the rest of his life. A couple of inches to one side and he might have lost that leg below the knee. So he hadn’t lost any love for good old Ralph.
Of course, if you sported no worse than a scar and no more than a mild dislike for one of your fellow human beings after he shot you, you were doing fine. It didn’t sound as if Dad had been so lucky. You always knew something like that could happen to a cop. But when it didn’t and it didn’t and it didn’t, when you moved the width of a continent away, you stopped worrying about it. And when you stopped worrying about it, naturally, that was when it happened.
Guilford petered out fast when you walked along Highway 6. Freezes and thaws had pitted the asphalt. Some of it still lay under snow; some peeked out. If any cars or trucks did come this way, they would have a tooth-rattling time of it. Rob wasn’t holding his breath. In the dista
nce, somebody hammered nails into a board. That was the loudest noise he heard. No motor vehicles within earshot.
Off to the south lay the Piscataquis. The ice on the river was starting to break up, but not nearly done. Some pines and broad-leafed trees still grew along the riverbank, though others had been cut down for fuel. The pines looked like, well, pines. The maples and whatever else kept them company thrust bare branches into the sky. They would get leaves for a little while, but they hadn’t done it yet.
Rob stopped and looked around. Somewhere right about here, that Hummer had smashed head-on into the eighteen-wheeler. The resulting mess blocked the narrow road and made damn sure that Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles wouldn’t make it up to their scheduled gig in Greenville. They’d ended up in Guilford instead.
If their two Ford Explorers had come by half an hour earlier… My whole life would be different, Rob thought. All our lives would be different if we’d driven through Guilford without stopping. Several local women would have different husbands, or no husbands at all. Several children wouldn’t have been born. Others who might have come along had the band reached Greenville now never would.
And what was the difference? Just a little timing. There wasn’t a person in the world who didn’t have a story like that. If you’d been a little late or a little early, if you hadn’t had that fender-bender back in the days when you could bend fenders, if that woman in the store with you had bought the secondhand book that changed your life when you read it, if this, if that, if the other thing, your whole life would be totally changed.
It made you wonder. It really did. Ordinary lives were so easy to jerk around that way. What about the lives of nations? Could all that If the South Had Won the Civil War, The Man in the High Castle stuff be true? If your destiny could twist like a contortionist slipping on a banana peel, what about your country’s?
“Yeah—what about it?” Rob said aloud. His breath smoked. Suppose the supervolcano hadn’t decided to go off for another hundred years? Or another ten thousand years? What would I be doing now in that case? Whatever it was, Rob was sure he wouldn’t be doing it in Guilford, Maine, right this minute.
Little Colin Ferguson wouldn’t have been born. Millions of people in the middle of the country wouldn’t have been buried in volcanic mud and ash or died of HPO and other horrible lung diseases or got stuck in the refugee camps that, from the reports trickling up into this forgotten backwater, lay somewhere between Indian reservations and the Gulag Archipelago on the sorry scale of man’s indifference to man.
But the world had what it had, not what it wished it had or what it might have had. Rob crouched in the middle of a snowless patch of ground off to the side of the road. It wasn’t all bare, black, lifeless mud: primordial ooze. Here and there lay a green fur of moss. A small, corpse-pale mushroom stuck up phallically. That looked pretty primordial, all right, but lifeless it wasn’t.
And, here and there, blades of grass were sprouting. Their green was different from the moss’. It was paler and brighter at the same time. It made you think summer barbecues were right around the corner. It did till you looked at the lingering snow a couple of feet away, anyhow.
If the winters stayed harsh, one of these years the grass might not be able to come up at all. Even if that happened, though, by then whatever did come up in Labrador in the springtime might have found a new home here outside Guilford. One way or another, life went on.
“Ob-la-di, ob-la-da,” Rob muttered. The Beatles had turned into golden oldies long before he was born. So what? Hemingway was a golden oldie, too. So was Mark Twain. Dickens. Shakespeare. Euripides, for God’s sake. People were still reading them all. People were still riffing off what they’d done.
That was immortality, or as much of it as human beings were likely to get. So it seemed to the wise, perceptive philosopher and sage known as Rob Ferguson, anyhow. The philosopher and sage’s knees clicked when he stood up straight. He needed to take a leak. That wasn’t immortality. It was mortality, reminding him it was around. He strode over to the closest pine and took care of business.
His stomach grumbled. Last he’d heard, the Chinese place in Dover-Foxcroft was still a going concern. As he’d seen when transportation was easier, it had always been as much about what you could get in small-town Maine as it was about what you could do with that stuff if you were a Chinese cook. Had soy sauce come north in trucks? Did the gal who ran the restaurant raise her own soybeans under glass and ferment them?
It was probably an academic question, unless a bunch of locals decided to go to Dover-Foxcroft in a wagon or something. He supposed he could ride over on a bike if he wanted to badly enough, and if Lindsey did. They could plop little Colin into a seat behind one of them and make an outing of it. Dover-Foxcroft was only seven miles or so from Guilford.
“Only,” Rob said. “Yeah, right.” Seven miles wasn’t impossible on a bicycle—nowhere near. But seven miles each way wasn’t something you did with a casual case of the munchies, either. As far as time went, it was like a forty-mile commute each way through downtown L.A. back in the long-lost days of cheap gas and clogged freeways. You needed a serious jones for Maine-inflected Cantonese before you’d start pedaling. Otherwise, you’d walk over to Caleb’s Kitchen and eat pork sausage and turnips or chicken stew or something like that.
He turned around and headed back to Guilford. He wasn’t going to walk to Dover-Foxcroft today: that was for damn sure. There was such a thing as working up an appetite before you ate, but that took it too far. He didn’t think he’d end up at Caleb’s Kitchen now, but you never knew. If his stomach growled again while he was anywhere close, he might stick his head in and see if whatever Caleb was cooking smelled good.
Yes, grass and maybe even some things with flowers were coming up. Yes, the snow was melting faster than it was falling. Yes, that really was an optimistic rose-breasted grosbeak chirping as it flew by. Yes, the temp was edging up toward fifty, and might not drop far below forty tonight. Back in those long-lost times, this had been about as cold and miserable a day as Los Angeles ever got. For a post-eruption spring morning in Guilford, it was a corker.
Somebody coming Rob’s way waved. He waved back—it was Justin. His bandmate wore a denim jacket over a ratty flannel shirt, and probably a T-shirt under that. He was dressed much like Rob, in other words. Justin’s hair was still curly, but not permed any more. Like Rob’s, Justin’s beard showed the first traces of gray. Beards were warmer than bare chins. You didn’t have to worry about blades, either, or learn to shave with a straight razor.
“What’s going on?” Justin called.
“Not much,” Rob answered. “It’s just another perfect day—”
“I love L.A.!” Justin finished for him. They grinned at each other. After a beat, Justin went on, “I don’t love it enough to want to live there any more, though. How weird is that?”
“Oh, pretty much,” Rob said. “But I’m so the same way. When Lindsey wanted to head south after Colin was born, I was the one who talked her out of it. And she, like, grew up here. How weird is that?”
“Plus royal que le roi,” Justin said in what would pass for French if no Quebecer happened to hear him. “I like it here, though, more than I ever did anywhere else. We’re out from under, know what I mean?”
“I just might,” Rob replied. “Yeah, I just might. Before the eruption, our taxes were making the accountant’s eyes cross.”
“Duh! How many states did we have income from the last year before the supervolcano blew?” Justin said.
“Lemme see. There was despair, lethargy, doped-outedness, rage, lust… .”
“Not quite what I meant, but close enough,” Justin agreed. “He said our mileage was liable to get us audited all by itself.”
“How come none of the IRS weenies ever went out on the road with a working band?” Rob asked.
“Because they’re IRS weenies?” Justin suggested. “Because they wouldn’t know picking a guitar from picking thei
r noses? But any which way, we don’t have to worry about any of that shit for a long time. We’ve fallen over the edge of the world. Here Be Dragons, the atlas says when it talks about places like this. We’re off the map, off the chart, off the goddamn Internet. I don’t miss it a bit. I don’t miss my belly a bit, either.” He slapped his stomach. He still carried more weight than Rob did, but he sure wasn’t pudgy any more.
“I don’t, either—now,” Rob said slowly. “One of these years, though, I’m gonna have trouble with a heart valve or my prostate’ll start trying to kill me or something else will go wrong. Then I’ll wish I was part of the big club, not the little one.”
“Hey, life is full of tradeoffs. If you have more fun while you’re living but maybe you don’t live as long—guys make that deal every time they light a cigarette or eat a pound and a half of prime rib. Do you really live longer or does it just seem longer ’cause it’s all a bore?”
“Right now, I’m with you. I told you that,” Rob answered. “Have to admit, though, I’m not sure I’ll say the same thing in my sixties.”
“Farrell does,” Justin said, which was true, even if Jim was bound to be past his sixties and into his seventies now. Justin went on, “Besides, if you do get sick I bet you can game the system. Show up in Bangor with a Social Security card and what will the hospital there do? Throw you out so you freeze in the snow? I don’t think so!”
Rob wasn’t sure his friend had it straight. The eruption had made everybody a lot more hardnosed. When there wasn’t enough to go around, people had to be. All the same… “And from what we hear, who knows whether things will be better anywhere else thirty years from now?” Rob said.
Supervolcano: Things Fall Apart s-3 Page 37
