He wasn’t inclined to be fussy. A fire burned in the parlor hearth, perhaps in honor of the newcomer. The man stood with his back to Rob, savoring the warmth. He was talking to Justin and Charlie, who listened in what was plainly fascination.
Hearing Rob and Barber come up behind him, the fellow broke off and turned toward them. He was in his late sixties, and looked like.. Rob needed a moment to realize who he looked like. If you took John Madden down to about five feet eight, that would do for a first approximation. He was ruddy and fleshy and had a sharp nose, bushy eyebrows, and silver hair.
He didn’t dress like John Madden, though. John Madden looked like an unmade bed, even in a suit. This guy could have been a 1930s dandy. A lot of his hair was hidden under a broad-brimmed black fedora. His overcoat boasted fur trim. When he shrugged it off, he was wearing a double-breasted, pinstriped wool suit underneath, with lapels sharp and upthrusting enough to cut yourself on.
“Jim, this is Rob Ferguson, also of Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles,” Barber said. “Rob, here before you stands Jim Farrell, recent unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress in the Second District-most of Maine, even if it’s not the part with most of the people in it. The ones who do live their chose, in their wisdom, the usual blow-dried airhead over someone who actually had some idea of what he was talking about.”
“Glad to meet you, Rob,” Farrell said in a resonant baritone. “Dick helped run my campaign, such as it was. He tends to forget that it’s over, and that we got trounced. Ancient history now, like any failed campaign.
“Speaking of ancient history, Jim taught it for years at SUNY Albany,” Barber said. “Then he retired and came home-claimed the good weather in Albany was wearing him down.”
Albany and good weather didn’t strike Rob as a likely mix. Farrell raised those extravagant eyebrows. “I’ve got over that,” he rumbled. “The way things are these days, so has Albany.”
Barber went on as if the older man hadn’t spoken: “He picked up a fair amount of fame-”
“Notoriety,” Farrell broke in, not without pride. “It was definitely notoriety.”
“-for his newsletters called To the Small-Endians. They skewered PC academics the way they deserve. Skewered ’em, hell-screwed ’em to the wall.”
Charlie jerked on the couch where he was sitting. He startled a cat sleeping beside him. “Oh, my God! Those things!” he said. “My older brother picked up a couple of them at an sf convention. I think he’s still got ’em. I’ve read ’em. They’re wicked!” He eyed Farrell with newfound regard.
Farrell doffed the fedora, showing off a hairline that hadn’t surrendered even half an inch. “I finally quit doing them. I gave up, in short. The real academic world proved madder and sadder than anything I could invent.”
“And he’s known for his comparative study of the campaigns of Alexander and Julius Caesar,” Barber added. “I can’t speak as a professor-I never even played one on TV. But as a career military man, it impressed the bejesus out of me.”
Rob, Justin, and Charlie eyed one another. Sometimes you got a song cue when you least expected one. Charlie started beating out a rhythm on his thighs and on the coffee table in front of the couch. That was a long way from his usual industrial-strength noisemakers, but it would do. It was plenty to make the cat, which had tentatively settled down again, head for the hills with a tail bristling in indignation.
And Justin and Rob launched into “Came Along Too Late.” Not every band had a song about Alexander the Great-one that even mentioned Julius Caesar, too-but Squirt Frog and the Evolving Tadpoles wasn’t every band. Not even close. The words were mostly Charlie’s, with some tweaks from Marshall back when he’d got into ancient history. They’d done it before larger audiences, but never before a more knowing one:
“Dozing before the idiot box
When hoofbeats awakened me-
History Channel, three a.m.:
So-called documentary.
Swords and sandals
Maps and blood
Watching the conquests spread and spread
Darius’ name was mud.
“Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Mopping up the Persian cavalry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Found his Hellenistic monarchy!
“Now some will stand out from the mass
In good times or in rage
For King Philip’s son by Olympias
Greece was too small a stage.
Had to spread out ’cross the world-
Couldn’t help himself, I think.
Everywhere his flags unfurled;
He won fantastic ink.
“Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Mopping up thery.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Found his Hellenistic monarchy!
“I know I live in the here-and-now.
It can’t be helped-that’s true.
But thinking of long-vanished days… Oh, wow!
All the things he got to do!
Lift a bottle with Aristotle,
Start Alexandrias all over the place.
One got a library
Founded by his longtime friend,
Good old Ptolemy!
“Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Mopping up the Persian cavalry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Outdoing Julius Caesar’s infantry.
Came along too late to see Alex the Great
Found his Hellenistic monarchy!”
“Came Along Too Late” was supposed to end on a wild flourish of cymbals. You couldn’t do those on your person or a tabletop. Justin solved the problem by using a doo-wop shout-“Woo-hoo!”-instead.
Jim Farrell looked from one member of the band to the next. (Biff was probably down at Calvin’s Kitchen. He’d fallen for a brunette who waitressed there. Whether she’d fallen for him was a different question, but he was in there pitching, anyhow.) “These are men of parts,” Farrell said at last, to Dick Barber. “I suspect some of the parts stand in desperate need of repair, but he that is without sin, let him first cast an aspersion at them.”
“Ouch!” Rob said, a noise with more admiration in it than pain. Farrell gave him a tip of the fedora if not a doff. But Rob quickly turned serious again. Here was a real, if unorthodox, politico in front of him. He hadn’t expected to have a chance like that. Since he did, he asked, “What do we do-what can anybody do-about everything the supervolcano’s doing to us?”
“Well, I can’t say I’m completely sorry the government seems to have forgotten about this part of the country. Sometimes being forgotten by the government is the best thing that can happen to you,” Farrell answered.
Rob wasn’t so sure he bought that. He was a liberal more often than not and in most ways. But he turned libertarian, if not reactionary, four times a year: when his estimated-tax payments came due. The band made raw money, with not a dime withheld. Rendering what Uncle Sam and the state demanded hurt more than it would have were he working a nine-to-five like most people.
Farrell hadn’t finished: “But it also seems as though everybody on the far side of the Interstate has forgotten about us. I think-I hope-we can get through one winter like that. When things warm up, if they ever do, we’ll have to see about stocking up for another long, hard, cold stretch next winter. If we can stock up. If there’s anything left to stock up on. It’s not just a Guilford, Maine, problem, you know. It’s worldwide.”
“It’s not so bad in a lot of other places,” Rob said.
“True enough. But it’s worse in some,” Farrell said. “How would you like to be in Salt Lake City or Denver right now?”
“My sister was in Denver. She’s one of the lucky ones-she got out quick. I guess she was lucky. Now she’s stuck in one of those camps in the middle of nowhere,” Rob said. “She can’t stand it, but she’s alive, anyway.”
Vane
ssa Ferguson commonly acted on the principle that the squeaky wheel got the grease. She didn’t believe in depriving herself of the pleasure ocomplaining. The only trouble was, there were a hell of a lot of squeaky wheels in Camp Constitution. The miserable place had to have a couple of hundred thousand people in it by now, and it was awful. A saint would have hated it. Ordinary people? Vanessa had heard the suicide rate at the camp was ridiculously high, and she believed it. It was much too easy to decide that staying here was a fate worse than death.
The people who ran Camp Constitution were from the government, and they were there to help you… provided you did exactly what they told you to do. If you didn’t, or if you were otherwise unhappy, well, they had Procedures for that.
To get your problem settled, or even noticed, you lined up at the Camp Constitution Administration Building. That only roused further resentment. As far as Vanessa knew, it was the only building in the whole enormous goddamn camp. It was flimsy and rickety and had been run up in a tearing hurry, but still… Federal bureaucrats deserved no less. That was what they and their paymasters in Washington thought, anyhow. Tents and FEMA trailers were for the rabble stuck in the camp 24/7.
You lined up regardless of what it was doing outside. Raining? You lined up. Snowing? Same deal. They did, in their mercy and wisdom, put up an awning that gave some modest protection from the elements. But that was all it gave: some modest protection. The ground under your feet still got gloppy. The weather still got beastly cold. People said it was the worst winter in these parts in they couldn’t remember how long. Everybody blamed it on the supervolcano. Everybody was likely to be right, not that that did anybody any good.
If you didn’t feel like shivering in the muck for however long you needed to see the people with the power to do something about your complaint (if they happened to feel like it), you could turn around and trudge back to your tent through even more of that same muck. The bureaucrats inside the administration building wouldn’t mind. Not one bit, they wouldn’t.
There weren’t nearly enough of them to handle all the people in the camp with problems. That made the line start well before the awning did. It inched forward with glacial slowness. Considering the weather, the comparison struck Vanessa as much too apt. She had a hooded, quilted anorak with a pink-and-purple nylon shell that was at least three sizes too big for her: charity, of a sort. She had long johns, too. More charity. She was cold anyhow.
She was also itchy. There were bedbugs in her tent. There were bedbugs all over Camp Constitution. Somebody’d brought them in, and they’d thrived like mad bastards. Several eradicating campaigns had failed to eradicate. The same was true for head lice, though she didn’t have those-yet. There was talk in Washington of making DDT to fight the vermin at the refugee camps. So far, it was nothing but talk. Vanessa had always thought of herself as a pretty green person, but she would cheerfully have shot a spotted owl to rid herself of her six-legged companions.
A heavyset, bearded man wearing a coat even uglier than hers-and they said the age of miracles had passed! — gave up and stumped away. He muttered a stream of obscenities as he went. Maybe they were what made his breath smoke. More likely, it was just the cold.
The queue moved up to fill the space he’d occupied. “One more we don’t got to wait for,” said the black woman behind Vanessa.
“One more the yahoos up ahead won’t have to deal with,” Vanessa said, pointing to the still far too distant building ahead. “I hate lines, you know?”
“Jez, honey, who don’t?” the black woman answered. “But what you gonna do?”
Vanessa still carried the. 38 in her purse. A few people at the camp had gone postal. One guy gunned down seven of his tent-mates before somebody brained him from behind with a baseball bat. For a nasty instant, Vanessa savored the brief, scarlet joy of flipping out like that. If the alternative was worming forward an inch at a time till you got to talk to some dumb fuck who couldn’t have cared less.. Sighing, she wormed forward another inch. Maturity and sanity sucked sometimes. They really did.
Half an hour later, she scraped the mud off the bottom of her Nikes on the sharp edges of the aluminum steps leading up to the administration building. Those edges already had a lot of mud on them, from others who’d done the same thing before her. The instinct not to track dirt inside remained strong, even when there was next to no inside and what seemed like all the dirt in the world.
A sign on the glass doors said PLEASE KEEP CLOSED. The administration building had a real heating system, not a half-assed propane heater in the middle of a tent. Nothing too good for the folks helping our refugees. The building had power, too, and computers and phones and broadband Internet and everything else Vanessa was missing except when she got in the line even longer than this one to go to the charging station to give her cell more juice.
In due course, she reached a counter behind which sat a thir-tyish dweeb with glasses and a broken front tooth. Before she could get down to brass tacks, he asked for her name, her Social Security number (only he called it her “Social,” which she wouldn’t have understood if she hadn’t already heard it from other pen-pushers), and her tent number. “And the nature of your difficulty is…?”
“It’s not just mine,” Vanessa said. “It’s everybody’s except for this one woman named Loretta. She has three horrible brats. They’re going stir-crazy, they’ve got no video games to play or TV to watch, and they drive everybody nuts. You can’t even sleep at night, ’cause they scream and fight for the fun of it. If you don’t do something about it, somebody’s going to pinch their little heads off.”
He fiddled with a computer. “That would be Loretta Baker, it seems. What do you want me to do?”
“Move her and the monsters out of there,” Vanessa said at once. “If you can’t do that, get me the hell out.”
“You realize conditions may be no better in the tent to which you are reassigned?” he said. Her heart sank. He wouldn’t move Loretta and the snotnoses, which was what she really wanted.
Sighing, she said, “I’ll take my chances.”
“It might not be so easy to make the adjustment.” He eyed her over the tops of his specs. “An attitude of cooperation would be expected.”
“What does that mean?” Vanessa figured she knew what it meant. Make nice for Mr. Federal Functionary and he’ll help you out, too. Don’t make nice and stay stuck where you are.
“Why, what it says, of course,” he answered primly. The son of a bitch had practice at this. He wouldn’t come out and tell her Fuck me or get lost. That might land him in trouble. But if you were that kind of bastard, you had to have opportunities galore in a place like this. Chances were he got laid a lot.
Vanessa got up from her uncomfortable folding chair. “Forget about it,” she snarled, thinking again of the revolver in her handbag.
The guy with the broken tooth only shrugged. “The choice is always yours, Ms. Ferguson. If you change your mind, consult with me again. I promise you excellent service if you do.”
And how did he mean that? Just the way it sounded, no doubt. Vanessa stormed out of the administration building. What really worried her was, those little assholes of Loretta’s were so very appalling, she feared she might come back and come across if somebody didn’t murder them first. She’d worried about this kind of thing before. Now, if push came to shove… She swore louder than the bearded guy had when he gave up on the line.
“It’s so wonderful!” Miriam Birnbaum gushed, and reached out to straighten a lock of Kelly’s hair that didn’t need straightening.
“Mom!” Kelly pulled away. She wished more and more she’d just gone through a simple civil ceremony with Colin. Her folks had almost given up on the idea that she’d ever get married. Now that they had the chance, they were trying to turn the wedding into a production number.
Well, they were footing the bill. That gave them a certain right to have things their way. Only to a point, though. It wasn’t their wedding, even if they w
ere paying. It was hers and Colin’s.
“I’m happier than I know how to tell you,” her mother said, and either proved that or gave it the lie by crying.
“Don’t do that!” Kelly exclaimed. “You’ll mess up your makeup!” She dabbed at Mom’s cheek with a Kleenex. It repaired most of the damage, anyhow. Her father-one of the best dentists in the South Bay, if he said so himself (and he did)-put an arm around her mother.
“It’s okay, Miriam,” Leonard Birnbaum said. “Colin’s a good guy.”
“I wouldn’t be crying if he wasn’t,” Mom said, which might have made sense to her but left Kelly mystified.
She was also gobsmacked that the lecturer’s slot at Cal State Dominguez Hills fell into her lap right after her parents hired the hall here. Whether she was obsolete or not, they wanted her. She would have had second thoughts about taking the job most of the time. If the University of California system was hurting, the California State University system was on the critical list. But CSUDH wasn’t more than fifteen minutes away from San Atanasio. As long as any gas at all got into the L.A. area-and as long as any money at all got into the Cal State system-she could go teach.
She wondered if Geoff Rheinburg knew the gal who ran the Dominguez Hills Geology Department. That would explain a lot. It would also be odds-on the best wedding present she got.
One side of the hall was packed with her relatives and friends. The other side was mostly cops: square, solid men in suits that had been stylish a while ago or maybe never. How many of them had shoulder holsters under their jackets? Marshall was there, of course. I’m a stepmother, Kelly thought in bemusement as she went up the aisle on her father’s arm. She hoped Colin’s other two kids were doing all right.
Next to Marshall in the front row sat Colin’s sister, Norma. Kelly’d never set eyes on her before. She and her husband, Earl, both worked nights, though, and didn’t show themselves when most people did. Kelly didn’t think there were any hard feelings between her and Colin, but they weren’t exactly close, either.
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